GameMonkey Script is a small, cross-platform scripting language designed, as its name suggests, for embedding into games. GameMonkey bears many similarities to Lua, except the syntax is more similar to that of C which makes it more intuitive for game programmers.

GameMonkey features:

• Cross-platform machine library
• C-style syntax
• A small memory footprint (~50kb)
• Soft, real-time incremental Garbage Collection (no reference counting)
• Native threading
• Full implementation of states
• Simple to bind with C/C++ code
• Debugger support (with supplied debugger)

Like Lua, the primary data structure in GameMonkey Script is the table. Tables allow for a variety of other data structures to be created; from arrays, sets, hashmaps, lists and records. They can also be used to simulate namespaces and C++ class structures, containing both functions and properties.

GameMonkey Script was written in 2002 by Matthew Riek and Greg Douglas as part of a closed-source project for Auran. However, on 12th June 2003 Auran granted license for the full source code of GameMonkey to be released to the public under the MIT License. It is currently being used in commercial and hobby applications on a wide range of machines; from the Windows PC, Apple Mac, Microsoft Xbox, Sony's PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube and various distributions of Linux.

External References

• GameMonkey Script homepage
• GameMonkey Zone, GameMonkey tutorials and articles