[friendlybus]

I mean, so does assembly. Rollercoaster tycoon was written in assembly. But for mere mortals lua is just too much hassle for game dev.

C# with XNA (or monogame) is a nicer 2d barebones game framework to work in, as long as you can dodge garbage collector issues.

[whizzter]

Wow, i usually don't like wording things like this but you're really talking out of your ass. Reading your comment about UI i guess you've heard of it regarding usage in World of Warcraft ? (that seems to be a subset of Lua proper by a simple googling)

Lua has de-facto been more or less the standard go-to scripting language for 20 years or so by now, i remember that we picked Lua for scripting a PS2/Xbox game that was shipped in 2004 because it was already gaining popularity among other gamedevs(yes we were probably late on it).

Apart from those embedding it themselves (probably far more than is known publicly). There is literally countless Lua only games since it's the base for user created games on the Roblox, Pico-8 and Love2d platforms.

These platform based games probably far outnumber those that embedded Lua because they are simple platforms to get started with, even my 12 year old kid is making Roblox games and writing Lua to wire up things.

[friendlybus]

Yes I've used lua for modding old games like Natural Selection 2.

The docs and community in roblox and factorio fill in for the deficiencies of the language. Try using lua without support frameworks. Modding ns2 is a nightmare with zero docs and trying to reverse engineer in a terrible debug environment. Lua just doesn't stand up by itself.

You are only discussing the successes. Even built for purpose, game building applications like Core fail miserably to make development easy enough off the back of lua. Far cry 1 had lua scripts that went nowhere.

What love2d games?? The tech demos and hobby projects listed on the website??

For the three or four big successes there are a lot of obscure failures.

The big successes of creative modding projects came out of Half Life, Half Life 2 and Warcraft 3 which spawned Dota, team fortress, counter-strike, left for dead, garry's mod and many other successes.

War3's editor and XNA are the best modding environment's I've seen for individual acheivement.

Kids dont know better, they just put up with the jank and learn from their friends.

[friendlybus]

You're all wrong and this is very frustrating.

[whizzter]

(Sorry for the late reply, been busy at work)

> The docs and community in roblox and factorio fill in for the deficiencies of the language. Try using lua without support frameworks. Modding ns2 is a nightmare with zero docs and trying to reverse engineer in a terrible debug environment. Lua just doesn't stand up by itself.

Yes, Lua is VERY bare-bones and highly dynamic (why it is a popular choice for embedding) so anyone using it for modding is required to invest a bit of time to actually document it.

> You are only discussing the successes. Even built for purpose, game building applications like Core fail miserably to make development easy enough off the back of lua. Far cry 1 had lua scripts that went nowhere.

Exactly, this applies for all games and much else in society. In this case you showed a big reason why modding for these games failed is that they really only did the scripting to finish the game but didn't document it or add hooks to make it reasonable for outsiders, but since there are successes that is probably more on the teams rather than the language itself.

> What love2d games?? The tech demos and hobby projects listed on the website??

The 1500 or so games on itch.io is a good example, now many of these are probably crap but if you look at the top rated there seems to be some nuggets there.

https://itch.io/games/tag-love2d

> For the three or four big successes there are a lot of obscure failures.

The same applies for any editor/framework/engine/language , the thing is that Roblox alone is such a big platform these days with the top third party games (100% lua) are big enough to feed multi person studios apart from Roblox itself heading for an IPO.

I personally don't even really like Lua that much (1-indexing smells), but i can still accept that it is capable enough to run a lot of things.

In many ways it's more powerful than JS while sharing other semantics and we're not escaping JS either these days due to the web.