The canonical language for San Andreas: Multiplayer gamemodes gamemodes has always been Pawn.
In the past nine years, Las Venturas Playground has accumulated over 90,000 lines of Pawn code spread over more than 425 files, written their own Pawn compiler and extended the syntax of the language to make it easier to use. Dozens of our staff members are deeply familiarized with the language.
While the language has served us well, it has significant limitations. Originally designed for use on embedded systems, Pawn scripts have a fixed memory footprint, and do therefore not have a heap. The absence of pointers necessitates extensive decision branches, and the amount of technical debt in our own code is depressing as well.
We considered many options in our search for the magical realms with unicorns and rainbows. A fresh start would be great, but is realistically unfeasible because of the required investment. Native code (C++) is great, but would significantly limit the number of developers we have.
Then there's JavaScript. Many developers touch it at least once, as it's the foundational language for Web development. It's easily accessible, got gazillions of tutorials, highly performant and its fault tolerancy reduces the significance of errors.
We chose the v8 engine because of its performance and friendly C++ API.
Las Venturas Playground does not have the development resources to rewrite the entire gamemode from scratch.
Therefore, JavaScript may be used in addition of the existing Pawn gamemode, and not instead of it. A powerful event model enables all SA-MP callbacks to be used and all native functions are available from JavaScript as well.
The PlaygroundJS plugin requires a series of dependencies to be available on the host. When compiling the plugin, both binaries and source must be available.
- Boost 1.72 or later.
- ICU 67 or later.
- libmysql 5.7, but no later version.
- OpenSSL 1.1.1g or later.
It should take a couple of hours to set this up on a Windows 10 machine with Visual Studio 2019.
This repository contains the source code of the plugin as well as the source code of our JavaScript-based gamemode. All code is available under a friendly MIT license, although we do ask you to give us some attribution.
An installation guide is available for PlaygroundJS as well.
Read the documentation, or continue to the Las Venturas Playground website.