[Kde-games-devel] kde bof notes

[Alan Horkan]

On Wed, 27 Sep 2006, Dmitry Suzdalev wrote:

> Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 22:36:57 +0400
> From: Dmitry Suzdalev <dimsuz at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: KDE games development <kde-games-devel at kde.org>
> To: KDE games development <kde-games-devel at kde.org>
> Subject: Re: [Kde-games-devel] kde bof notes
>
> On Wednesday 27 September 2006 22:19, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> > http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDEgames+Akademy+2006+BOF+Notes
> Many thanks for the notes, Albert!

"KBoard uses lua scripting, gnome games used it [Lua] but dropped because
distros had problems pakcaging it, not a problem for KBoard as the lua
code is inside ugly solution?"

I should clarify, gnome-hearts used Lua but the developer of that game was
very interested in becoming an official part of Gnome Games.  Based on the
difficulties he had packaging gnome-hearts he was willing to rewrite his
scripting in Python instead because it is popular and well supported
among Gnome developers.

Nothing is official yet but Gnome Hearts is very likely to be added to
Gnoem Games sooner or later.  http://www.gnome-hearts.org/

> > Richard Moore shows us some nice examples on kjsembed. He is going to port
> > kpat to use kjsembed so there's an example on how powerful kjsembed is.
> >
> >  kjsembed has the benefit of beign already in kdelibs.

> I was just thinking about this one. Isn't it simpler to use existing kde
> scripting technology rather than external scripting language?
>
> What are benefits of lua?

I would be more concerned that Lua configuration files are more awkward to
manipulate than XML (there are so many tools out there which understand
XML) and tieing config files to a particular language might have long term
maintainance issues.  Lua may be the greatest language ever but it isn't
very popular yet and someone else have to maintain the code later.  I'm
not saying dont use it but try and make sure it is possible to use at
lesat a basic version of the game without needing the Lua scripting.

There are packaging issues with Lua but as mentioned at the BOF those have
been worked around by including a whole copy of Lua with the game (whihc
is still quite small if I recall correctly).

-- 
Alan Horkan