[Kde-games-devel] scripting languages

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> however, i'm sure there's a very good reason for Lua in this case. as such, 
> i'm curious to know what it is =)

Paolo can probably contribute more, but here are my 2 cents :)
Lua is actually commonly used in the gaming industry: I have attended a 
couple of talks in the Game Developers Conference about it, 3 or 4 years 
ago. It is used not only for interface configuration (as in WoW), but 
actually for game logic as well and level scripting. Psychonauts for 
example is reportedly written as a C++ graphics engine that uses Lua for 
all game behavior and AI.
I suspect that one of the reasons for this is that the Lua runtime is 
very small (100Kb) and fast, and the syntax is easier for 
non-programmers to get. Also, one big advantage for game companies that 
does not apply to us is probably the MIT license, which is more 
forgiving for embedded scenarios, as the Lua runtime is usually compiled 
in the game executable.
Lua's main author gave a talk about it at FISL 2005. One of the 
advantages of it for configuration is that it is both a scripting and a 
data description language, and it is easily binded to C/C++ code.
It would be nice to have Lua script support in Kross imo. It is not as 
widely used as some of the other languages for sure, but it has very 
special features related to how memory is managed that make it specially 
suitable for writing AI finite-state machines. It is not a priority for 
application scripting imo, but as KBoard already has several interesting 
uses of Lua it can be interesting to know how this evolves.

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini