OOP isn't really necessary for anything. It does make many complicated tasks an order of magnitude easier, though. As a simple example, consider the replication of a Pokemon game in SCII. Objects (with prototyping) are the perfect (and, in my opinion, the only logical) way to represent moves, movesets, and -- of course -- the Pokemon themselves. A "PokeSpecies" object can hold the data for an entire species of Pokemon (holding things such as the base stats of a species, its types, egg groups, etc.), and a "Pokemon" object can hold the data for an individual Pokemon (holding things such as the fact that your Gardevoir has a Lonely nature and some really good Defense EVs). Both could use prototyped methods to retrieve, process, and compare data. (A PokeSpecies may have a method, queryMoveset, that checks if it can learn a certain move -- useful when a TM is being used.)

AFAIK the only way to do this in the SCII system would be to use arrays, with properties as elements and named constants holding the indexes. (E.x. NAME = 0, and the 0th element of a Pokemon is its name.) We'd need to know ahead of time exactly how many properties we would need to have, since dynamic arrays are unsupported. We wouldn't be able to define some equivalent functionality to methods (because since it's C-style, we can't use the "everything is an object" paradigm, and so we can't store functions in arrays), so we'd have to pollute the global namespace with a ton of data-processing functions.

So a very advanced system with high-level abstractions and lack of code duplication is possible without objects, prototyping, or dynamic arrays. But AFAIK/IMO it's extremely difficult to code and almost impossible to reliably or easily maintain.

I do hope that I'm proven wrong. I hope that SCII's scripting is designed in a way that makes everything possible and indeed, programmatically beautiful, without OOP. But as an OOP-dependent (self-proclaimed) JS expert, I just don't see how that's possible.

(I'm absolutely certain that objects' are useful for more than just massive remake projects. However, I lack the non-programmatic creativity required to think of other projects that would depend on them.)

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 9 2010, 4:53 am by DavidJCobb.

Probably most people nowadays get used to fashionable OOP programming style. Yes, there are benefits, but I guess they do really starting to play their role in *large* programming projects. Not so long ago people haven't even known about OOP.

DavidJCobb,
you've forgotten one thing of non object oriented programming style. The modules. Modules may be used like objects to encapsulate data and functions. Instead of Pokemon object you have a Pokemon module, with all "public" functions (and other declarations) declared in separate public (which contains only exported declarations) header file. In that module you define t_Pokemon type and a constructor "t_Pokemon makePokemon()" and then all other functions you need to work with t_Pokemon, and so on. Doesn't it sound like an object?..

Also, about dynamical arrays. If we'll have a way to work with the heap (manually allocate data in memory), that is really not a big loss (and only loss of convenience but not the expressive power of the language).

Post has been edited 7 time(s), last time on Mar 9 2010, 7:07 am by Wormer.

It's not object oriented.

According to the OP, you can still use objects.

@Wormer: "Forgotten"? I never learned non-OOP! D:
@Syphon: I thought... that "OOP" meant "this language has objects".

BTW, just because I feel the need to post this... I'm not saying that SC2 will suck or anything because it's not uber-object-focused. I neglected to post my favorable opinions simply because SC2's awesomeness is common knowledge by now.

Now to bring this topic back on topic. From the recent Blizzard Chat:

Q. Will units that have been cut from the game still be in the Galaxy Editor, or higher tier units from original StarCraft?
A. Units that have been cut from the game completely will NOT be in the editor. However, there are many units that make an appearance in the single-player campaign that WILL be available to use in the editor, such as the Medic, Firebat, and Goliath.

Q. Is there support to build symmetrical maps in the editor, if so, does it include rotational symmetry and odd player numbers?
A. You can build whatever types of maps you want in the editor but there are no methods of auto-mirroring parts of the map.

Q. Can we expect have new maps or the map editor in the beta soon?
A. Yes. We will be adding a few new maps as we continue to release patches including a few 3v3 and 4v4 maps. Additionally, we are hoping to release the map editor to the community sometime in April.

Q. Will it be technically possible to recreate a Defense of the Ancients custom map complete with ladder and matchmaking?
A. You will be able to re-create the map and we are looking at different ways for community maps to become part of the ladder and matchmaking.

Q. Does map publishing also store any extra resources (sounds, graphics, etc.) specific to the map, or is this a limitation?
A. Yes. If you add art or sound to a map, it's stored in the map and is therefore downloaded with the map once it's published. Long-term we will be adding support for custom mods where other maps can depend on a single mod pack. For example, if the community wanted to build a "Classic StarCraft" mod, they could do that and share it online and then many maps could be built that depend on that mod.


Note there are 4 pages to this chat:
http://starcraft.incgamers.com/blog/comments/starcraft-ii-beta-developer-chat-1-transcript

Hmmm so I wonder if they will include all original starcraft units like they said they would earlier in the development. I sure hope they do.

The custom map ladder would be completely awesome also.