MIST vs MOOSE vs plain LUA

[Yuriks]

Just trying to understand concepts behind MIST and MOOSE.

I understand they are libraries of functions built on DCS ME scripting engine, but they seem to be quite different in syntax and logic.  There is extensive documentation on both, but may be there is a helicopter view on the logic behind both of them. 

Also, sometime it seems that using plain Lua would do the same e.g.  LUA math.random() vs  MIST mist.random ()

 

 

[Grimes]

Mist is meant to supplement the base scripting engine where the majority of the functions are related to getting and organizing data in a useful way but still relies on you using the base functions within the script. There are a few functions that try to simplify complex functionality like mist.respawnGroup and some of the flagFuncs. There are functions in mist that have scripting counterparts where it really doesn't matter which one you use, while there are others where things are executed a little differently. For instance math.deg and mist.utils.toDegree are identical, the mist version exists because I was adding a bunch of converters and figured it should exist. On the other side of the spectrum the differences between mist.dynAdd and coalition.addGroup are quite extensive. Simply put mist.dynAdd is overloaded to populate any missing data other than coordinates and unit type. It'll generate new ids, names, heading, etc and it'll save that data to be added directly to the mist DBs because there is some data for dynamic groups that isn't accessible.

Statistically math.random has a tendency to choose the first and last possible values less often. I'd argue that it is a use case question because depending on what you are doing it could be more noticeable. Picking a random number between 1 and 10000 to add a randomized distance or altitude for a flight wouldn't cause much of a problem. Picking a random number to spawn a given task that are always in the same order then yeah maybe you spent the most time on the first task and wonder why it gets picked less often. See the screenshot, both tests called the respective .random function 1000 times and it shows the distribution. The message is formatted as the number and how many each function returned that value;  "Number : math.random : mist.random". Anyway the distribution bothered me even though it isn't likely to be that big a deal and I wrote some code to try and balance the result. 

 

Moose takes the object oriented programming approach where literally everything becomes an object with its own set of sub-classes. You could probably write a script that exclusively just makes moose calls without directly calling any function from the DCS scripting engine yourself. Moose in the end would use Unit.getPoint or whatever but you wouldn't need to. 

[Yuriks]

@Grimes thank you, very interesting 

I generally feel more comfortable with OOL but I find Mist more intuitive over Moose. Moose just emulates objs with DCS SE, correct?