Fw: History of Lua aside... note about game usage!

["Nick Trout" <nick@...>]

 

>>Lua is not a project with its own budget, not even at TeCGraf.
Lua is our (=roberto+celes+lhf) project. In the very least, we can use this
information to show that Lua has an impact and that it's worth to finance us
so that we can keep developing Lua. This helps us get/keep research
fellowships
(and the occasional prize :-) ...
Thank you all for your Lua stories. Keep them coming.

Arrgggh! Dont stop work on it!! :-)

We are a games company called Video System (based in Manchester UK and
Kyoto, Japan). We have written 2 games for the Dreamcast (Formula 1), and
are now working on PS2 (and PC). The front end of these driving games get
quite large and complicated (take a look at Gran Tourismo 3 on PS2!) and it
took a lot of programmer time to implement our first 2 front ends. So, I was
very keen to put Lua in a scripting language to write the front end. The
widget and messaging system is C++ with a Lua wrapper generated with toLua.
All the animation and effects will be done with Lua. The advantage is there
is no compile and run overhead and the scripting allows you to get stuff up
and running faster and also modify stuff faster. When you come to submitting
your game to Sony or whoever they can demand quite a few changes which are
no so easy to change in C code. What appeals to me about Lua is (the usual
:-) ease of embedding, speed and portability (since we will hopefully do
XBox, GameCube and PC versions in future... we'll see). In addition I have a
couple of "home" projects which use Lua, one being a sprite game IDE, which
one day may see the light of day.

>>What is your experience? Do people around you know Lua? How did they know
about
it? Did you tell them yourself or was it the other way around? Do you know
other people that are using Lua but who are not in lua-l? Would you rate Lua
as a "popular" language? Do you see its popularity increasing?
We'd really like to know a realistic estimate of the impact of Lua.

I am an advocate of Lua and have recommended it to other games programmers.
I know at least one who has taken up my advice. I dont know if they are on
the list. I'm not sure if Lua is popular or not yet. I would say Python may
be more popular (on PC) but I think Lua is a better choice, more so as it
improves and if it sticks to its current goals. Popularity increasing? yes!

Regards,
Nick.