Re: Bookworm Adventures Postmortem

[Joshua Jensen <jjensen@...>]

Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo wrote:
> If they wanted Javascript they knew where to find it, right? :-(
>   
I would suppose.  Or grab something like SmallC.

I once modified the syntax heavily like this long ago (Lua 3, as I 
recall).  I wasted a lot of time doing that, and in the end, it didn't 
help much... it only hindered.

Having operators like += and *= (beaten to death here) would be very 
nice convenience features, so I can't disagree with that.
> "Furthermore, we made a series of incredible performance enhancements to
> the execution speed and memory management of the interpreter. We greatly
> decreased table access times and improved the performance of the garbage
> collector."
>
> Now, it would be interesting to know details about this.
>   
When working on Amped 1 under tight memory situations, the main 
performance enhancements we did (and previously mentioned on this list) 
were avoiding Lua constructs which allocated memory and routing memory 
allocation into pooled heaps of memory.  It's not clear which version of 
Lua PopCap used, so it's hard to speculate.
> "Lua was a constant source of extreme anger and frustration."
>
> :-(
>   
Having shipped Lua (through LuaPlus) in Amped 1, 2, and 3, Links 2004, 
Top Spin 1 and 2, NFL Fever 2004, NHL Rivals 2004, and more, I can say 
Lua was a tremendous help.  Lua was also tremendously helpful in my 
latest game, Pathstorm (http://cavebug.com/), where I got to use 
coroutines for the first time in a game.

In any case, Lua is what you make of it.  If all you can think about is 
debugging in your blessed IDE, you're going to have constant 
frustration.  In Amped, we had a remote debugger application (ships in 
LuaPlus), but all I ever heard about was griping because it wasn't built 
into Visual Studio and had bugs.  We had to task switch between the 
Remote Lua Debugger and Visual Studio when we stepped in and out of 
code.  That was mildly frustrating, but it was better than having 
nothing at all.

When you realize Lua isn't C or C++ and is intended for a different 
purpose and is a higher level language, everything works out just fine.

IMHO.

Josh