A Lua success story - MUD game implementation

[Nick Gammon <nick@...>]

Hello everyone,

I just wanted to pass on some complimentary remarks I received about  
Lua recently. I know that lists and forums tend to discuss problems,  
and when something works perfectly, you often don't hear about it.

My general area of interest is MUD games (Multiple User Dungeons),  
effectively multi-player games where players from around the world  
participate in text-based interactive fantasy worlds. Conceptually  
they are similar to graphical MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online  
Role Playing Games), which are an offshoot of the original idea.  
Examples of MMORPGs are World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Club Penguin,  
and similar. (WoW incidentally uses Lua for its client scripting).

However the text-based games are still possible to be implemented and  
operated for little or no cost, due to their much lower development  
overheads than the more modern graphical versions.

I have been using Lua for a few years now on the client end, with much  
success. I have also been encouraging its use at the server end, to  
simplify scripting of computer-operated "monsters" and other agents.

I recently received a highly complimentary posting from the operator  
of one such server. If I may quote him:

--------------------
"All of the game scripting in Aardwolf MUD is Lua based. Other than  
the rewrite itself, it has been the best single project we ever  
implemented.

Performance has been fantastic. With literally millions of prog  
executions per day, hundreds of paused couroutine threads running at  
any given time (pauses in game progs), 3,500 old "mobprog" style progs  
converted to Lua plus around a thousand more since it was added, we  
experience no lag from GC whatsoever and the debug lib is reporting  
just under 10M usage at time of writing with a peak around 16M during  
the night."

...

"Bottom line, if you're wondering whether it is worth the work to  
convert to Lua, it absolutely is. Our builders love it and even  
mention side benefits like being able to put a "real" programming  
language on their resume."

...

"It is fast, stable, and mainstream."
--------------------


The full posting is available here: http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=8306

Just thought you would like to know. Lua is appreciated.

- Nick Gammon