RE: Game company adoption and Lua was RE: Ironic comment RE: coop erative multitasking

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

> > Yeah, the documentation is pretty abysmal.
> 
> I find this a bizarre criticism. The Lua manual is brief, clear and
> comprehensive. 

I agree, its a reference manual. You dont want waffle in a reference manual.
Everything is in there if you look hard enough. Waffle would make the
information harder to find. There are plenty of script examples on the Wiki:
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LearningLua
http://lua-users.org/wiki/SampleCode

I dont think its the scripters that are struggling it the API users. I think
what would help embedding programmers would be some case studies and
explanations of embedding strategies and some more tutorials about how to
use the C-Lua API. I can embed Lua but I'm still very interested in the
details of how others have done it. There are so many ways you can do it
there doesnt seem to be many people with a common approach. eg.

How are objects represented in C and Lua?
How do C and Lua communicate, and how do objects communicate?
How do I represent multiple concurrent live objects?
Which side should I store the game state on?
How do I serialise my game objects?
How should Lua be called?
How should I bind my C objects?
How do I handle errors and debug my game?

Because of the flexibilty it is difficult to document all this. Maybe case
studies would be best then you can pick and mix.

Regards,
Nick