Oh I agree that Visual Studio is a great editor for C# and that there is no "intelligent" editor for eScript. However that is not a black mark against POL's versatility. At the time when POL came into being I don't think C# was a popular or even usable language. So Eric Swanson created the eScript language which is loosely based on Pascal which was the most mature, popular, language at the time except maybe for the C programming language. I will note here that RunUO took advantage of an existing language with pretty good tools at the time to build an emulator but POL/eScript predated C#. The copyright states the year as 1993. Also influencing Eric's design for POL could have been the popular, (at the time) UCSD implementation of Pascal which used a "virtual machine" that interpreted a compiled pseudo code from Pascal source code. That last piece of info is not relevant to the versatility of POL but does imply a higher level of security than is the case for native compiled code running on the system's CPU. I only mention it to give some background to what I think was Eric's mindset. Pascal was the language being thought at many major universities even as late as the early 2000s.
Visual Studio is written by a commercial entity, Microsoft, to support their languages, one of which is C#, and the managed code base that comes with it. RunUO and ServUO simply took advantage of Microsoft's work. Eric created the virtual machine, the compiler AND the eScript language. I am certain if Eric Swanson had the financial backing that Microsoft had he would have gone on to create a very nice development environment for eScript. Maybe not but we will never know.
There is another significant difference between C# and the eScript/POL environment. C# is a "general programming language" as you know. While eScript could be a general purpose programming language, the POL environment is a specialized set of functions
specifically written to emulate an UO server. That makes a big difference when programming in eScript. It simplifies the coding experience when writing scripts. There is extensive
online, and
downloadable, documentation for POL's functions, objects, methods, configuration files, and script types.
I also must make the case for the learning curve for individuals new to programming when comparing eScript to C#. There is a steep learning curve for C#, much more so than eScript. I have told the story of one of my sons, when he was 15, with no prior programming knowledge, wrote a script for an in-game piano, that when double-clicked, displayed a gump of songs that the player could choose from and played the canned UO song. I think it only took him a day or two to create the initial script and maybe two more days to finish it. And he had never seen a source code listing of any kind prior to then. Yes I believe he is smarter than the average but I also believe if he had started with C# it would have taken him longer than a week to even get a basic script written.
So back to the editors available for eScript. I grant there is no Visual Studio type of development environment for POL/eScript but there are a number of code editors that are great for eScript. Among them are SciTE, Notepad ++ and Ultra Edit. They provide code highlighting and code folding and other useful tools. The reason there is no "intelligent" eScript editor is because no one has written one. As I understand it plug-ins can be written for Visual Studio. Perhaps someone with enough knowledge could even write one for eScript that could take advantage of POL's numerous specialized functions.
"POL implemented as many of the client features as possible". I can recompile RunUO core and edit all the packets, add & remove them, thas allows me to do the same.
Your comment does not change the fact of my statement and what you said is obvious. Of course you, or anyone, can edit, manipulate packets etc. for ServUO/RunUO. It is open source. The same can be said for POL or any other open source piece of software. I fail to see the point.
It is fairly obvious you like RunUO/ServUO, Microsoft's C# managed code environment and their commercial integrated development environment, Visual Studio. That is great. When I need to edit C# or C++ that is my default editor as well. I just thank God I do not have to edit or write C# code for POL.
Finally, I looked at your list of posts here on the POL forums. You have made four (4) posts as I write this reply. Two (2) of them are from 2010 regarding an issue with uoconvert and the last two (2) were to complain about the opinion of the author of the website and to complain about the fact there is no IDE like Visual Studio for POL/eScript. If you are that concerned about the "poor POL shard developers" not having a tool similar to Visual Studio then maybe, since you seem to be so talented with C#, you could create one for us or perhaps a POL/eScript plug-in for Visual Studio. Or do you just feel the need to come to our forums and complain about POL? You are free to do so of course. I have plenty of complaints about POL and I voice them, sometimes to the chagrin of the developers but then again I have been developing in the POL environment for sixteen (16) years and I have just a few more posts than you ZrnecX.
My apologies for the tone of this post but I just do
not understand the need to complain about something that you clearly have no interest in using. I find C# terribly cumbersome to learn and program but I don't go to the ServUO forums complaining about their choice of a development language. In fact when I have posted on their forums, except for one time, I try to be helpful. The only time I posted what might be construed as a negative post had to do with potential copyright and intellectual property violations relating to Carl Hamilton and his Dark Shard project, not about ServUO.