HaloScript Intro

Haloscript (also called BlamScript) is a custom scripting language used in Halo and other games running on the Blam engine. It uses a syntax heavily based on Lisp.

For instance a "script" (a function defined by the user) that prints Hello World to the debug output on startup would be:

(script startup welcome
            ;this is a comment, this line will be ignored
            (print "Hello World")
)

To break down what individual parts of that mean:

• script marks the start of a script function.
• startup is the type of script, it tells the scripting system to start run the script on startup
• welcome is just the name of the script
• print is a "command" (function built into the scripting language) that outputs a message of type string to the debug output.

Using the word "script" when talking about a user-defined function and "command" when talking about a function that is built into the language is a convention that will be used in the rest of this documentation.

Function calls

In the example above we see the function print is being called with the argument "Hello World". Only certain type of functions can be called, all commands can be called but only "static" and "stub" scripts can be called. See [Script types] for more.