Re: lua and Baldur's gate

[Ken Rawlings <krawling@...>]

Hi Cameron,

   Just curious -- what things has your experience shown that a scripting
   language should and shouldn't be allowed to do? I'm still fairly new to
   embedded scripting and am trying to get a feel for things.

   Also, how do most Lua programmers handle errors? The error function
   stops the intepreter cold, which with minor errors isn't necessarily
   what you want. I've been toying around with ways to emulate basic
   exception handling, but it doesn't look like that's possible without
   hacking the Lua source.

Thanks,
_Ken

On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, Cameron Tofer wrote:

> Hi, I helped set lua up for BG.  Mainly what is was used for was a debugging
> tool.  No game specifics required lua. i.e Baldur's Gate could run without lua
> fully functional.  All debugging commands were exposed to lua and a lua prompt
> exposed to the game.  This allowed complex debugging without spending much
> development time making debugging tools.
> 
> Mdk2, on the other hand, is a completely different story.  This time lua is
> critical for game functions.  Lua's main purpose is its parsing ability.  Many
> file formats were scraped because code/data could be parsed by lua and read from
> the host.  The real-time debugging features were taken to another step with mdk2
> allowing for much more complicated tests. Even as far as proto-typing.(we did
> quite a bit of early Neverwinter Nights proto-typing with the Omen engine and
> lua.)  The other main use for mdk2 is that most of the movie scripts, ai scripts
> and time events are all done with lua code.
> 
> Lua has become quite a usefull tool, if used correctly.  We have learned that
> there are things that a scripting language just shouldn't be allowed to do.
> However, on the whole we've been pretty happy with the decision to use lua.
> 
> Cameron Tofer
> Lead Programmer/Assitant Producer Mdk2
> Bioware Corp.
> 
> 
> Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone have information on the use of Lua in Baldur's gate?
> > A Web search gave only 2 pages (plus some 5 usenet messages):
> >
> >  http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/6124/ScriptCompiler.html
> >  http://hem2.passagen.se/eddy1/gamehack/baldur.html
> >
> > but none of these are "official".
> >
> > I'm trying to get as many entries in our projets page
> >  http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/lua/uses.html
> > but our impression is that there are many more uses of Lua around that
> > we don't know about.
> > Please, send your entries! Use the form at
> >  http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/lua/uses-form.html
> >
> > (I doubt that this plea will make any real difference, because I doubt that
> > most Lua users are actually in this list, but I'm desperate :-)
> > Anyway, it will be much easier to support Lua if we can show our sponsors that
> > Lua is widely used. So we need all the info we can get.)
> >
> > Thanks.
> > --lhf
> 
>