[optionalparens]

Please re-read what I wrote. I said 1 or more of these items, not all of these items. Additionally, please read my reply elsewhere in this thread about speed in dialog engines where I listed out why, where, and when speed does indeed matter for dialog engines (thus cache lines). Moreover, the last thing you would want is for dialog of all things to murder your cache when it one of the easiest places to optimize for the cache in an entire game engine.

Lua is indeed used to fix many things in game engines, but not really most of what I listed. The top reasons scripting languages tend to be used on top of other languages like C/C++ in games is to avoid lengthy recompilations, provide an entry point for user-editing/plug-ins, serve to some degree as a more RAD tool, and build a DSL for scripting events.

You are correct data-driven is interesting, but your conclusion is 100% wrong. The entire entity component system approach and the general trend towards functional paradigms couldn't be more at odds with you. I can't think of what might be the best resources off the top of my head for you to read, but there's plenty out there on ECS, functional-style C/C++ as related to games, and low-level engine design stuff on older blogs like the one BitSquid wrote years ago.

The entire industry is moving to trying to make games as data-driven as possible. This is as you point out the anti-thesis of what you are saying. Further, your point is really bad advice for any game programmer. Making things less data-driven in general makes it infinitely harder to debug, cache, build editors around, send over a network, save/load, update/migrate, share between threads, and be consistent.

What you are proposing would make you fail an interview with any decent game developer or get you fired. You would drive a tool designer insane as well. Huge chunks of games are built by creating tools with code to manipulate data, not code. That data often lives external to the code entirely, whether it is an excel sheet, custom binary format, custom database, or something else. You want as little as possible in the code and nothing that will affect compilation time. Moreover, you need to be able to also do things like translations and internationalization, not to mention add new assets, hot-swap things during dev, and so on.

In other words, no, building a DSL in Lua is not more powerful as you describe. It could be powerful if it was data-driven, anything else simply would not get used in a professional setting with decent developers. I don't understand why sometimes on HN people want to graft general programming or web dev on to games. That's the only way I can explain this kind of thinking, and even data-driven approaches are becoming more prevalent in these areas.

[je42]

regarding cache lines: if i understand correctly, the scenario you are optimizing for is that your engine carefully needs to be in control of all cache lines to met the performance requirements. any "rogue" component like a dialog system, can destroy this cache layout and hence the performance guarantees are not met ?

regarding data-driven vs lua.

my point of view is data == code. except that the guarantees you can provide when using code are less but you get more powerful expressions and flexibility in return. ( ==> turing completeness ) the more you are willing to give up turing completeness you get to the "data driven" side. The stricter and less powerful your data is, the better you are able to guarantee performance and other requirements. however this comes are the cost of loosing flexibility and agility.

i agree. what i am proposing works in a small team (<10) where everybody does everything. this doesn't scale to large teams. (or rather i haven't seen this in working in large teams)

[optionalparens]

Again, childish downvoting by someone here.

The term component here would be incorrect, rather "system" would be a better term.

There are many variations and approaches to what I am talking about so I'll stick to one very common approach used by a lot of studios and engines today. A typical more cache-friendly update cycle goes like this, calling "update" as a function of time/state on each system:

System A -> System B -> System C -> System D -> etc. (loop and repeat each frame)

This cycle sometimes skips certain systems for either performance or sim reasons. Each system tends to have inner loops and the overall system loop is often broken up a bit into sub-loops or separate loops, ex: render vs. physics for purposes of separate sim-time looping. The idea here is you do a single operation over and over again on the same type of data, avoiding lots of pointer chasing, v-tables, and so on along the way. The code branches very predictably and it becomes easier to avoid loading data into the cache that will blow it up or not fit into a page.

What makes this friendly to a data-driven approach is if you're working mostly with systems that operate on pure data, your update each frame from a purist point of view approaches a functional reduction. In practice, there are certain things that don't fit perfectly into this paradigm, but the idea most engines take is this approach + cut corners when necessary.

I am contending that your point data == code is wholly false. Again, this is well-known in computer science to the point where your argument only stands if you're looking at code from a very low-level point of view. Again, all current game development trends refute what you are saying - almost every year there's one or more GDC speaker sessions about this topic, see the GDC vaults, see Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine, etc.

Yes, to a degree code can be data, but it becomes exponentially difficult to manage and process vs. simple representations that tend to be language, runtime, and network agnostic - i.e. data structures. Lua tables and other things inside Lua are not the same (at least not until serialized to a more language agnostic format), especially in the face that in most real game dev situations, you're passing data between tools and languages, and in several different flavors of run and design time. I've done quite a bit of code as data approaches to know that even when it can be done, it has many drawbacks - see object databases, Smalltalk continuation serialization, code gen tools, etc.

Functional languages and several more fringe languages tend to be closer to code == data, the most wildly known and regarding being Lisp-like languages. Typically these languages have a minimal amount of abstractions and power things like first-class macro systems. Even in the face of macros, there are many drawbacks to dealing with code this way in general, and even more in a game. For instance, restoring state exactly as it was and is, and using that state in the face of updates to the game itself are paramount to the point where few games can survive without it otherwise. Data makes this easy.

What you are asserting as more power is exactly the opposite and I'm not sure how I can make this any clearer. Your code can freely operate on data any way it wishes, not the other way around. Code operating on code is generally a bad idea which is why clever meta-programming techniques and code generation are things you would rarely see in any game engine unless it was a hack or a bad implementation.

You are losing little by making things a data representation and gaining much in terms of what I already listed. All the benefits of data are far more valuable for game development and I am not sure what cannot be achieved by forward-loading or pipelining data into an asset pipeline and operating on that data doesn't achieve that this does. Beyond performance, the other benefits like editors, network transparency, easy loading and saving of state, and so on make it easier and faster to develop even small games.

What you are proposing is a solution looking for a problem. I'm not denying it's a fun thing to do, especially if we're talking about a regular "app" rather than a game. Personally, I like coroutines, fibers, CSP, continuations, multiple dispatch, and other fun CS tools but not for game programming in most of the time, and certainly not at the level of an important game system. I am asserting that in the game dev world, treating code as data is a really bad idea, which several other people have also pointed out here. Your solution adds very little, while adding unnecessary complexity to check a "cool" computer science box.