Re: Bookworm Adventures Postmortem

[Stefan Sandberg <keffo.sandberg@...>]

Ha, way to dig their own hole..

"Furthermore, since the syntax of the language changed as we 
added/modified features,
the game's coding style frequently mixed original Lua syntax with C++ 
syntax.
But we weren't about to throw out tens of thousands of lines of source 
code just to beautify things."



Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> > The PopCap Games guys put up a postmortem on their newest game, Bookworm 
> > Adventures.  It has many references to how they used Lua, modified it to 
> > accomplish their needs, and the technology they built around Lua.
> >
> > http://www.igda.org/casual/quarterly/2_2/index.php?id=2
> >     
>
> "We heavily modified the Lua interpreter to support many advanced
> features. The first thing we did was to change the syntax to be almost
> identical to C/C++ since the BASIC-like coding style was irksome, and to
> add in sorely missed operators such as +=, *=, ++, etc. "
>
> If they wanted Javascript they knew where to find it, right? :-(
>
> "Furthermore, we made a series of incredible performance enhancements to
> the execution speed and memory management of the interpreter. We greatly
> decreased table access times and improved the performance of the garbage
> collector."
>
> Now, it would be interesting to know details about this.
>
> "Lua was a constant source of extreme anger and frustration."
>
> :-(
>
> "The Lua debugger was highly experimental and didn't become stable until
> several months before launch."
>
> So, why blame it on Lua??
> --lhf
>
>