Has anyone tried integrating maxscript with xna and try and make viewport updates using maxscript? For the map editor, I am thinking its going to offload a whole bunch of tasks. The ones that I immediately want to offload to maxscript are undo/redo stack, zoom/pan, object transformations(scale,rotate,move)

Do you mean you intend to make your editor completely inside 3dsMax?

If not, I can't really see why you'd want to do this. Maxscript is built in to Max - I'm prepared to stand corrected, but I don't think there's any nice way to rip it out and use it outside of Max. To do any integration, you'd need to write a parser and interpretor for maxscript, which is not a trivial task. The undo/redo stack is built in to max and is only exposed to maxscript as an interface. Maybe I'm not understanding your intentions here.

Well I was able to write a sandbox app in .net and load it into a rollout menu in maxscript. But what I wanted was to have a scripting language inside the mapeditor but according to the post here it seems that writing a scripting system isn't simple. There still needs to be a way to tell the engine to do things dynamically in game.

fearlessdolphin:

But what I wanted was to have a scripting language inside the mapeditor but according to the post here it seems that writing a scripting system isn't simple. There still needs to be a way to tell the engine to do things dynamically in game.

It's not simple. If you need a scripting system it's going to take time and effort to develop. You can use C# as your scripting language though assuming you don't want to run on the 360.

Note that, for MaxScript, you really need to write your primitive functions using the Function Publishing Interface. That's a big hairy mess of macro defines and varargs constructors, where you have to repeat yourself three or four times to describe an interface, the functions on it and the arguments to those functions. And it's all in native C++, not .NET. Thus, you'd need another layer to go from native C++ to .NET to go from MaxScript to your integrated XNA drawing surface.

Could it be done? Yes. Is it simpler than writing a complete scripting language from scratch? Yes. Do you need to know the Max SDK pretty well to be successful? Yes.