Re: Bookworm Adventures Postmortem

[Eike Decker <eike@...>]

The game is playing well - they made a good job on the gameplay I think. Though
I wonder what the 150k lines of code went to... Would be nice to know what
parts are written in Lua and how much code is used for the engine stuff. I
guess most of it is C++ code - the luacode in the game is using 186kb discspace
in compiled form. So I would guess that it would be something between 20k lines
of code... maybe less. But maybe there's some code hidden in the pak file. 

Anyhow, the thing that I am interested the most is:

"And to aid in rapidly designing code we added a complete state synchronizer
that allowed you to modify any Lua code and reload it while the game was
running."

How can this work? And how stable can this work? Any idea? 
It sounds highly useful, but I can't imagine that this can work stable - what if
certain variables are removed or parts are changed - what is happening then to
the previously assigned values?
When I required a piece of code to be replaced for debugging purposes, I put it
in a file and allowed reloading the whole file, though that always requires
some more lines of lua code handling the reloading stuff. But I would prefer an
automed solution...

-eike