LUA in roguelikes - yes or no?

[PaulBlay]

I admit to a certain degree of confusion as to exactly what LUA does for you (and how it should be added to a project). There are a number of variants that use it, and many that don't. And I don't see that ones 'with' are doing things that ones 'without' can't (but maybe I'm missing stuff).

Anyway, your thoughts please.

[Psi]

As WinCE is one of the few platforms that LUA does not compile on, I'd rather it vanished from the Roguelike landscape.

[PaulBlay]

As WinCE is one of the few platforms that LUA does not compile on, I'd rather it vanished from the Roguelike landscape.

At least that's a nice clear opinion and reason. Thanks.

[zaimoni]

The only Angband variant that clearly uses Lua to do things that are painful in C, is ToME. (Not impossible, just painful: casting function pointers around to what they need to be.) Lua's prioritization of backward compatibility makes it a very reasonable choice of C-extension language, in spite of its feature similarity to C.

[takkaria]

As WinCE is one of the few platforms that LUA does not compile on, I'd rather it vanished from the Roguelike landscape.

That's more a deficiency of the C compiler for WinCE than it is of Lua, though...

[takkaria]

I admit to a certain degree of confusion as to exactly what LUA does for you (and how it should be added to a project). There are a number of variants that use it, and many that don't. And I don't see that ones 'with' are doing things that ones 'without' can't (but maybe I'm missing stuff).

Anyway, your thoughts please.

First, it's not LUA, it's Lua, the Portuguese word for 'moon'. Don't shout.

Second, there is nothing that can be done in one Turing-complete language that can not be done in some other language. So you can do the same things in C, C++, Python, FreePascal, Lua, etc. since they are all Turing-complete. The reason people add scripting is because generally, higher-level languages (Lua/Python) make certain things easier in ways that lower-level (C) languages don't. It's also very much a matter of personal preference. If you don't want scripting, then you don't want Lua; if you prefer to put item effects outside the compiled game, then you want to use Lua (or some other scripting language).

[Pete Mack]

That's more a deficiency of the C compiler for WinCE than it is of Lua, though...

That may or may not be the case. It's not constructive though, and a quick google shows that it is possible to use lua on WinCE, with a little effort.

[Psi]

That's more a deficiency of the C compiler for WinCE than it is of Lua, though...

WinCE lacks some of the standard C library functions that Lua depends on. I'm not going to defend WinCE - it just happens to be the platform that I always have available

[CJNyfalt]

I just refuse to have to learn a little used scripting language like Lua. If I add scripting I'll choose a mainstream one like Python, which has 50 times more use and is easier to get documentation for.

[Variaz]

In Portralis, I use lua a lot to make customizable monsters, abilities, complex quests with events, etc... So in my case, LUA has proven to be very useful, especially since sometimes, you can post fixes to very annoying bugs without having to make a release just for it.

[konijn_]

First, it's not LUA, it's Lua, the Portuguese word for 'moon'. Don't shout.

Second, there is nothing that can be done in one Turing-complete language that can not be done in some other language. So you can do the same things in C, C++, Python, FreePascal, Lua, etc. since they are all Turing-complete. The reason people add scripting is because generally, higher-level languages (Lua/Python) make certain things easier in ways that lower-level (C) languages don't. It's also very much a matter of personal preference. If you don't want scripting, then you don't want Lua; if you prefer to put item effects outside the compiled game, then you want to use Lua (or some other scripting language).

What he says, I got really mad about bands last week and wrote a 3 page rant on the train without internet access. Some stuff I wrote was factually not true, so I didnt post it. This part of the rant still holds I think :

"lua !!! As I contemplate where the game industry is going, how much hellband could use some scripting, what a user community lua could attract from other games, I feel as if Robert was 10 years ahead of himself. Yes, lua might or might not ruin things for mobile phones and such , I just think the lua binding was done in a naive fashion. It should have looked at the lua files , check out the non standard functions and export only those instead of everything in extern.c . It was probably a bad move to go away from lua, yes I am contradicing my earlier self, sorry Konijn anno 2007. "

T.

[Nick]

What he says, I got really mad about bands last week and wrote a 3 page rant on the train without internet access. Some stuff I wrote was factually not true, so I didnt post it.

I so want to see the rest of it now. Did you insult anyone?

[Magnate]

I just refuse to have to learn a little used scripting language like Lua. If I add scripting I'll choose a mainstream one like Python, which has 50 times more use and is easier to get documentation for.

What he said - though I think enhancing the functionality of the edit files would be more worthwhile than porting any of the code to Python.

CC

[konijn_]

What he said - though I think enhancing the functionality of the edit files would be more worthwhile than porting any of the code to Python.

CC

A script language is not about _you_ , it's about the _users_.
So if you really think that indentation based code is more intuitive than c like code, fine. But again, the choice should not be solely based on what the developer likes. Notice though that very few ( I cant find any, but I didn't look hard ) script engines for game use python. I wonder why ?

T.

[zaimoni]

A script language is not about _you_ , it's about the _users_.
So if you really think that indentation based code is more intuitive than c like code, fine. But again, the choice should not be solely based on what the developer likes. Notice though that very few ( I cant find any, but I didn't look hard ) script engines for game use python. I wonder why ?

T.

More importantly, why did RR go with Lua when he took over maintainership of V, when he himself initially forked V2.8.3 to use Python scripting?

Also, Wesnoth did use Python scripting, back when I was there (sadly, the terrain changes from 1.3.2-1.3.7 broke Mystery Campaign beyond my ability to patch). One of the bigger issues then was computer security: Python's dev-team tore out what restricted-execution ability the language had in the 2.2/2.3 transition as it got in the way of the new backend class architecture. Among other things, this was the end of the line for the Grail web browser (written in Python).

That said, Python's dev-team routinely trashes future-compatibility of current scripts against later versions. This basically locked Wesnoth into using Python 2.4; it was technically infeasible for them to upgrade to Python 2.5.

(Those who read USENET have seen my flamey rants on this point. Python has C speed and efficiency when used properly, but it's not something I'd use for anything that had any risk of needing regular maintenance.)