Golem Agent Language

The Golem Agent Language (GAL) is a fairly simple text-based scripting language that is used by the Agent objects in Golem Studio of Unreal II. It is required in order to create functional Golem Entity Script Agent objects.

Overview

Agents

An Entity Script Agent is an object that acts as an intermediary between an entity and its Entity Scripts objects. Note that GAL scripts should not be confused with Entity Scripts (the former controls Entity Script Agent object logic, the latter define a static set of animations). The name Ägent"stems from the fact that Entity Script Agents are a higher level of abstaction than Entity Scripts, and entities normally access scripts through agents, and not directly.

While agents are entirely optional for having a working entity, agents make animating entities a lot easier. They dynamically combine different static scripts to a whole dynamic set of animations. Using Golem Studio you can easily see the difference between using entity scripts directly and using agents by enabling and disabling Agent mode in the Render window.

Agents vs Entity Scripts

There are numerous advantages of using agents as opposed to entity scripts, or even pure animations, directly. As a comparison, you can think of pure animations as something that games like Unreal Tournament 2004 use. Entity Scripts allow you to combine these pure animations with dynamically generated animations, such as surface walkers, vertex explosion effects, lipsync curves, etc. (see Abilities for a complete list), and combine several of these static or generated animations into one. That alone makes the system a lot more powerful than pure animation-based solutions. However, entity scripts are still inherently static.