(This blog was originaly posted at #AltDevBlogADay)
All game developers, sooner or later, learn to appreciate scripting languages. That magical thing that allows for letting others do your job, better scaling of the team, strengthening the game code/engine separation, sandboxing, faster prototyping of ideas, fault isolation, easy parametrization, etc. Every game has to be somehow data driven to be manageable, and stopping at simple configuration files, with many different custom parsers, without going the extra mile of adding a full scripting language, is 90% of the times a bad design choice.
Today the developer can choose from a large variety of scripting languages, or even go crazy and implement one on his own. It happens that the most favored language for game developers is Lua. Its easy to understand why Lua is the favorite but other options are used as well. For example Python and the lately upcoming force of Javascript.
Here I would like to share some of my experience of moving a game engine from Python to Lua. Read the rest of this entry »
