Re: Lua on iPhone

[Joshua Jensen <jjensen@...>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Feldman
Date: 4/27/2010 6:00 PM
> Joshua Jensen wrote:
>
> > As near as I can figure, the only way I can ship levels for a game 
> is to embed them as raw
> > C code in my application's executable, because the mere act of 
> interpreting the data is bad.
>
> Nonononono, that's exactly what Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone compiler was 
> doing and it's explicitly forbidden in the new guidelines. Quote:
>
>  - "Applications that link to documented APIs through an 'intermediary 
> translation or compatibility layer' are strictly banned"
>  - "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or 
> JavaScript"
>
> Running your "<Width>5</Width>" XML script through a custom 
> pre-processor to convert it directly into a "SetWidth" call and 
> statically binding that to your application would clearly violate 
> this, God help you if you get caught!
>
> (rolls eyes...)
Funny story: Many years ago, I wrote a text adventure on a Commodore 
64.  I didn't know about data structures, and I coded every location in 
the text adventure directly in BASIC.  I would test for a direction, and 
when the user decided to go North, I would GOTO the appropriate line 
number for the room located to the North.  It was spaghetti code galore!

Reading Apple's rules literally, they can be understood to mean I have 
to code my levels directly in C, just as I did my text adventure all 
those years ago.

But translation into the SetWidth() call directly wasn't what I was 
thinking of.  What I was actually thinking was memory overlays.  If a 
block of data is read directly into memory and no further processing is 
performed, that should be okay.  If I parse through the binary data and 
make it do various setup functionality, including pointer fix ups, I 
think I fail Apple's legal requirements.

What truly makes me sad from a Lua perspective is I have become used to 
using coroutines within the game to do things like tutorials.  Now, I 
have to write massive state machines to accomplish the same effect.  Oh, 
well.

In any case, I'm still going to use Lua for my data formats.

Josh