On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 9:18 PM, Dominic McDonnell
<telarau@xxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:telarau@xxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
Hi, I'm a student studying games programming in Australia, as its
half way through our last year the local games companies have just
started pitching themselves to us. A few of them have said that
they use LUA for all or most of the gameplay programming.
Is that a new trend, or has it been around for a while? I can see
the advantages of using a scripting language for gameplay, with no
recompile times, and the possibility of not even having to restart
the game to see the effects of changes. Does anybody know how
widespread the use of scripting languages are?
Thanks in advance,
Dominic McDonnell
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The first commercial game I ever worked on back in the '90s had a
scripting language built in. The use of scripting languages in game
development goes back at least to the 70s. Now days I can not think of
a single major game engine that does not have a scripting language
built into it. So, it is very common and has been the normal way to do
things for 30 years or so.
Over the last 10 years LUA and Python have become the most commonly
used scripting languages. LUA feels a lot like C/C++ so people
familiar with those languages feel comfortable working with it. Python
is just so widely used that finding people who know Python is no great
challenge.
As for performance... well it just isn't an issue. If you find a
function in the scripted code that is taking up too much time you just
recode it in whatever language the engine is written in and add it to
the engine. Modern engines are designed to let you add code and make
the code usable as functions and object visible in the scripting language.
So, the use of scripting languages is very wide spread and has been a
part of game development for decades. If your course of study did not
include information on game engines and scripting languages I'd say
you have a good case for suing your school for false advertising.
Bob Pendleton
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