Re: new releases [was Re: Official public code repository]

["Jim Whitehead II" <jnwhiteh@...>]

On Dec 26, 2007 11:33 PM, Ariel Manzur <puntob@gmail.com> wrote:
> Still, World of Warcraft might be an exception, since it requires more
> support and follow up, as most massive games do. They'll probably
> never upgrade versions tho.. Also (speaking as a business owner now),
> we have chosen lua for our game engine, which is a bit of a
> longer-term project, since it's not limited to just one game
> development time, and upgrading versions wouldn't be out of the
> question, given the right circumstances (still, I don't think we'd
> ever do it in the middle of a game).

To be fair, with the release of "The Burning Crusade" expansion to
World of Warcraft, and the non-expansion patch prior to that release,
WoW moved from Lua 5.0 to Lua 5.1 in order to take advantage of the
incremental garbage collection and the new vararg system, among other
things.

The specific Lua implementation used includes a "tainting" system that
separates the Blizzard Lua code from the code included through third
party addons.  The project initially began using Lua 4.0 and has
evolved as the language evolves.  Will the version used for the game
continue to follow the language?  I suspect that depends entirely on
the reasoning and features that are added to the language.

Just to throw a bit more information into the mix.

- Jim