Re: Re[2]: Bookworm Adventures Postmortem

["Leigh McRae" <leigh.mcrae@...>]

 I don't know why people can't just use lua for what it's and use something 
else for wht it's not.  Sorry but talk about making lua look like something 
else pisses me off.  One thing I hate about Python is that it doesn't feel 
consistant but that's the way it is, use it or don't.
 The statement about simplicity is a little odd.  I used lua 4 for The 
Warriors on PS2 and I would have to say that simplicty was a huge benifit. 
Having to step through the lua VM wasn't even close to the pain for stepping 
the Python one.  I tried embedding or extending (good googley moogley that 
topic itself isn't simple) and after I finished it I releaized that it was 
WAY to heavy.  Don't get me wrong, I love Python and use it for my building 
in my art pipeline but using it to script a game left a bad taste for me. 
For my purposes lua was EXACTLY what I wanted.  Lua is small, easy to use, 
didn't come with a extra features I didn't want etc.  We didn't write all 
our game in lua, we basiclly used it for events and wiring.  Systems got 
prototyped in lua and then eventually moved to C.  The with scripting 
engines in a game is that they tend to look like a nail and everyone is 
holding a hammer.
 We did have some memory problems but tell me Python doesn't have them. 
For memory I preallocated the globals table and I also changed the table 
allocation not to double its size.  Also Lua lived in its own pool.  Lua 
never showed up on the profiler unless there was something wrong.

Leigh McRae

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lothar Scholz" <mailinglists@scriptolutions.com>
To: "Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo" <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br>
Cc: "Lua list" <lua@bazar2.conectiva.com.br>
Sent: Sunday, March 18, 2007 4:39 PM
Subject: Re[2]: Bookworm Adventures Postmortem


> Hello Luiz,
>
> > > 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
>
> LHdF> "We heavily modified the Lua interpreter to support many advanced
> LHdF> features. The first thing we did was to change the syntax to be 
> almost
> LHdF> identical to C/C++ since the BASIC-like coding style was irksome, 
> and to
> LHdF> add in sorely missed operators such as +=, *=, ++, etc. "
>
> LHdF> If they wanted Javascript they knew where to find it, right? :-(
>
> I agree, if progammers are really concerned about this syntax differences
> then they aren't very experienced.
>
> LHdF> "Furthermore, we made a series of incredible performance 
> enhancements to
> LHdF> the execution speed and memory management of the interpreter. We 
> greatly
> LHdF> decreased table access times and improved the performance of the 
> garbage
> LHdF> collector."
>
> LHdF> Now, it would be interesting to know details about this.
>
> I must say i think the same same. I like the programming model but it
> is very slow and i really don't know why the design of lua wants to
> use slow hashtable access anywhere. My performance tests show that for
> function calls there is a lot (i really mean a lot) room for
> optimization.
>
> And sorry i never understood why simplicity is a positive value in a
> language implementation. A clean simple API is but internal
> implementation is _NOT_. Thats a very academic point of view.
>
> I'm now using lua because there is nothing else with this memory
> footprint, but i have to say i'm not as impressed as i was after
> reading the first tutorial.
>
> And by the way, please offer real arrays and a builtin performance
> optimized object system soon.
>
> --
> Best regards,                        emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot 
> com
> Lothar Scholz                        http://www.ruby-ide.com
> CTO Scriptolutions                   Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's