RE: Lua and QuakeC

[Brian Hook <hook_l@...>]

> QuakeC is C, but compiled into bytecode instead of native assembly.

Not quite.

With Quake, "QuakeC" was an actual language that was different 
syntactically than C.  It compiled into a byte coded VM.

Quake 2 used pure C and compiled natively (no VM).

Quake 3 used pure C and compiled either to a byte code VM (via ICC) or 
to native (if you wanted to trust that).

> I don't think QuakeC was used all that extensively. 

It was used a lot.  All the mods were done in QC, which means weapons, 
rules, movement, monster AI, etc. were all done in QC.

> 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/

Yeah, one day we might finish that after doris and all the other crap 
we have going on =)

Anyway, Lua is more than sufficient to do basic AI.  I wouldn't 
necessarily do path finding and collision in it without calling out to 
a C module, but for the basic state machines, there's nothing wrong 
with using Lua.

Keep in mind that QC would run typically on a Pentium/133 machine.

Brian