Chipmunk: MyWorld’s Scripting Language
Introducing Chipmunk
Chipmunk is a fast, powerful, dynamically typed scripting language designed to be easy to learn and intuitive to use for both new programmers and industry veterans alike. It has modules, classes, powerful trait-based inheritance and polymorphism, and is competitive in speed with other industry-standard languages.
Chipmunk is hosted in a dedicated GitHub repository, and a good set of examples of the language’s syntax and capabilities is the official language test scripts.
Attaching Scripts - Lifecycle & Permissions
Scripts are run in MyWorld by attaching them to entities. Any entity can have scripts attached, including your avatar, and scripts can be run on either the client or the server. Some of the library modules that MyWorld exposes to scripts are only available on the client, and some are only available on the server. When an entity loads, its scripts are immediately run. Depending on the code contained in each script, it may either run and terminate shortly afterwards, or it may register event listeners to remain permanently “running” until it stops itself, de-registers event listeners, or its entity is removed from the world.
All scripts must declare an entrypoint method named main() in a module named main:
module main
def main(){
# ... implement main here ...
}
Scripts that should not terminate when main() exits must register event listeners before main() exits.
MyWorld’s permission system is not yet functional, but once it is assume that serverside scripts generally run with the permissions of the entity they are attached to and that clientside scripts run with the permissions of the user whose avatar they are attached to.
Note that client-side scripts run on every client that is in range of the entity, and they run with the permissions of the user who is logged in on that client - so a script may be able to do some things but not other things depending on which user’s client it is running on.