Lua Support?

I hope you guys are planing to use lua as the scripting language seeing that its one of the best languages for modding.

From what we've heard; no Lua.

JS for the UI, and possibly Python for the sim.

No.

I am a personally fan of Lua as well, but there are no plans to use it for PA.

Sadly, no I'm still waiting for the announcement of what language they will use.

If I remember things right, then Python was one of the possible languages, the alternative being Javascript. At least for the GUI, JS will be used since it works well with Webkit.

Lua is surely not a modern language, that thing doesn't even allow for native OOP and there is no such thing as a "standard library" so every game which makes use of LUA has to bring a whole bunch of third party libraries to fix the shortcomings. And while LUA is small and lightweight when dealing with small problems, it tends to get nasty when batch processing large amounts of data due to the lack of suitable data structures and optimized arithmetic libraries.

I would say lua is a very modern language, it does support oop natively (not that oop means much in itself) it has a standard library and it has no short comings that one would be needed for

when you're writing a game with script you need something lightweight as most of the actual work will be done in your game. the script is just to link it together and call the right parts.

that said its all up to the people making it. if python fits their skill set better then it's not a big deal.

That sucks oh well, Python what a lame name for a programing language :lol: .

Python is actually a very, very awesome language (and more widespread than Lua, even though Lua has gained popularity a lot in the game sector over the past decade).

Python much cleaner and more intuitive than Lua, if you ask me. Great for mods, server code, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)

I hope Uberent sticks with Python for the server / sim code till the end. It'd make so many things better on so many levels...

The Lua stuff for SupCom was a huge mess, and while you can write messy Python as well, Lua lends itself more to messiness than Python in my opinion, which stays readable and maintainable much longer - even in huge projects.

Python would be awesome as it is one of the most easy languages out there and yet is very powerful.

I'll learn it if its python, but =/


IMO Lua was fine. Not sure what the problems were with it in the first place.

Lua is a tough nut to get multithreaded.

Python may be better, but I have no experience with that part of Python so I'm just speculating.

Yes, that, and the Lua in SupCom was a godawful convoluted mess.

Ok, might have been GPG's fault, but I've seen more messy Lua code in games than Python code in games, so I'll take my chances.


Stackless Python (used extensively in EVE Online), or implementations like PyPy, are very powerful and flexible when it comes to multithreading and concurrency.

Being a modder of SC2 for years now i can't say it a mess in any way its very organized and straightforward in the way it functions, Maybe to some one that doesn't understand how its stacked out my think its messy, I've never used Python so i can say how its layed out.

Hehe try SupCom1 or FA
The flow was there if you knew how to track it. But alot of times it looked like you had 3 or 4 coders working on the same chunk of code without agreeing how it should flow. Taken as a whole it was almost like they had 3+ different themes to how the code should stack & how other functions where called.

More like 10 coders but yeah.

I don't think most people realize the pressure we are under when developing most of these games. I've never worked on a title that felt like we had enough time or money to build it. Maybe someday

In the case of SupCom there is a lot of project history nobody has ever heard about in detail. It's not really my place to talk about it but the game almost didn't get made.

Despite the criticism SupCom receives here I think most of the community is glad it was made. Even if they didn't like it I'm sure they can appreciate it will indirectly make PA a better game.

Despite LUA being popular I think there are better general purpose scripting languages out there. Personally I prefer Perl but since most people have an aversion to using a Swiss army chainsaw to turn a screw I'd say that Javascript is a good candidate. It's easy to use and learn, fairly powerful, natively object oriented, and runs everywhere.

I could really see the pressure when looking though the code for SC2 i also found a lot of the engine functions where never tied back to the engine its completely understandable seeing the time frame that they had.

FA's UI code was a mess. I found the sim code to be pretty good, save for the replication of the /lua/ folder in MohoData.scd. It just became a process of wrote-memory to look for useful code in there.

We are very glad it was made.
I am very much in awe that you were part of TA as well as SupCom.
And I am thrilled you are spearheading PA.

I have so much hope that whatever pitfalls happed in SupCom, you learned from it and are building something bigger and better.