Re: lua and Baldur's gate

[Cameron Tofer <cameron@...>]

Hi, I helped set lua up for BG.  Mainly what is was used for was a debugging
tool.  No game specifics required lua. i.e Baldur's Gate could run without lua
fully functional.  All debugging commands were exposed to lua and a lua prompt
exposed to the game.  This allowed complex debugging without spending much
development time making debugging tools.

Mdk2, on the other hand, is a completely different story.  This time lua is
critical for game functions.  Lua's main purpose is its parsing ability.  Many
file formats were scraped because code/data could be parsed by lua and read from
the host.  The real-time debugging features were taken to another step with mdk2
allowing for much more complicated tests. Even as far as proto-typing.(we did
quite a bit of early Neverwinter Nights proto-typing with the Omen engine and
lua.)  The other main use for mdk2 is that most of the movie scripts, ai scripts
and time events are all done with lua code.

Lua has become quite a usefull tool, if used correctly.  We have learned that
there are things that a scripting language just shouldn't be allowed to do.
However, on the whole we've been pretty happy with the decision to use lua.

Cameron Tofer
Lead Programmer/Assitant Producer Mdk2
Bioware Corp.


Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:

> Does anyone have information on the use of Lua in Baldur's gate?
> A Web search gave only 2 pages (plus some 5 usenet messages):
>
>  http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/6124/ScriptCompiler.html
>  http://hem2.passagen.se/eddy1/gamehack/baldur.html
>
> but none of these are "official".
>
> I'm trying to get as many entries in our projets page
>  http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/lua/uses.html
> but our impression is that there are many more uses of Lua around that
> we don't know about.
> Please, send your entries! Use the form at
>  http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/lua/uses-form.html
>
> (I doubt that this plea will make any real difference, because I doubt that
> most Lua users are actually in this list, but I'm desperate :-)
> Anyway, it will be much easier to support Lua if we can show our sponsors that
> Lua is widely used. So we need all the info we can get.)
>
> Thanks.
> --lhf