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Script Attributes

Script attributes are a powerful feature of OasisW that defines the public and configurable interface of a script. You can expose specific parameters that can be easily adjusted programmatically when instantiating or configuring scripts in code. This means you can write a script once and then easily adjust its behavior and properties by different instances or different team members.

Why Use Script Attributes​

  • Clear Public Interface: Attributes formally define which parts of a script are intended for customization, improving code clarity and maintainability.
  • Visual Configuration: When using visual development tools, attributes can appear as editable fields that provide a user-friendly interface for artists, designers, or other developers to configure scripts without diving deep into code.
  • Programmatic Configuration: When creating or managing entities and script components through code, you can directly set initial values for these attributes, enabling dynamic and flexible setup.
  • Reusability: Create generic scripts (e.g., "Movement" script) and customize attributes (speed, direction, target, etc.) for different entities through code configuration.
  • Collaboration: Enables team members who don't primarily focus on coding to modify gameplay elements, character stats, and visual properties.
  • Rapid Iteration: Quickly test different configurations and values by modifying initialization parameters in code.

How It Works​

When you declare attributes in a script, you're essentially defining properties that can be initialized and modified.

  • In Code: You can set values for these attributes when adding scripts to script components or through script instance properties at runtime.
  • Programmatic Access: You can directly access and modify attribute values through script instances.

For example, you can expose a speed attribute for a rotation script. You can set it programmatically with this.speed = 5; in the initialize method or set it when configuring an entity with entity.script.myScript.speed = 5;. This allows you to set different rotation speeds for different rotating objects using the same base script logic.

Systems: Classic​

OasisW has systems for defining script attributes that correspond to types of scripting methodologies:

  1. Classic Script Attributes: Used with older "classic" script (.js) files. Attributes are declared using the specific MyScript.attributes.add(...) API.

Understanding and utilizing script attributes is key to building flexible, maintainable, and collaboration-friendly projects in OasisW when configuring scenes through code.