RE: Lua and QuakeC

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

> Had someone compared Lua and Quake 1 QuakeC?

QuakeC is C, but compiled into bytecode instead of native assembly. Lua
obviously a different syntax, but is also compiled into bytecode and
executed on a virtual machine, like Quake C. They are not the same VM.

> That's why I'm asking:
> 
> In Quake 1, QuakeC was used to define all the logic of
> the game, objects behavior, AI, event handling,
> collision detection and many, many other things.
> 
> What I would like to know is if I could use Lua in a
> game as intensive as QuakeC was used in Quake 1 (and
> Hexen 2).

I don't think QuakeC was used all that extensively. The logic for the
monsters is pretty simple from what I've seen. I think Unreal codes more
of its monster logic its scripting language than Quake does. This is
evident in the game, where there are far fewer monsters because of the
overhead of the logic in script. PC processors are a lot faster than
that now so it should be feasible to code a lot of your logic in a
scripting language. An example of this is Farcry which is distributed
with a couple of megs of Lua scripts.

I'd say it is perfectly possible to substitute Lua for Quake C and
indeed this is one of the objectives of the Q2X project, in which I'm
involved:

	http://icculus.org/q2x/

Nick