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I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

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Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#61

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

Feolkin wrote: post #54
pull_my_finger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roberto Ierusalimschy makes an interesting point on this in an interview[1] last year. > When we started Lua, the world was different, not everything was C-like. Java and JavaScript did not exist, Python was in an infancy and had a lower than 1.0 version. So there was not this thing when all the languages are supposed to be C-like. C was just one of many syntaxes around. > And the arrays were exactly the same. It’s v…

I'm confused. Lisp does 0-based indexing. Lisp predates C and C-like languages by decades.

Lisp isn't the reason modern-day languages are all offset-indexed though; that's Cs fault

Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#62

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

snazz wrote: post #9
umvi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1-index kept throwing me off though

It’s unfortunate that Lua makes some strange decisions, but the powerful functionality totally outweighs the weirdness (metatables are especially cool). I really like Lua, especially for game programming with LÖVE.

"strange" in the sense of different from other languages in 2020, yes, but not strange from the perspective of its developers.

Lua is a language for both hardcore C programmers and complete n00bs wanting to configure their C programs. In that context, position-based indexing makes much more sense, as it's how most non-programmers think.

Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#63

Post by siraben »

justinclift wrote: post #19

The author has some relevant blog posts (in GitHub issues) too: https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/35 - BYTEPATH Postmortem (2018) https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues/44 - One Year Sales Data for BYTEPATH (2019)

That's a very interesting way to use GitHub issues. I wonder what sort of problems can arise with vendor lock-in, though.

Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#64

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

anonymoushn wrote: post #14
shakna wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you get used to it, it does help prevent a whole bunch of off by one errors though, as you don't need math when grabbing a range. Like a string will always be: s:sub(1, #s) And a sequence table will always be: for i = 1, #t do t[i] end

I disagree. Particularly when parsing strings, it's useful if the upper bound of one substring is the lower bound of a nonoverlapping substring immediately after. For example, here's a routine to split a string into the part before the first dot and the part after: function split_dot(s) local idx = s:find(".", 1, true) if not idx then return s end return s:sub(1,idx-1), s:sub(idx+1) end It may come as a surprise that…

> It may come as a surprise that one should use a difference of 2 to skip over one character!

On the contrary; unless you're very used to offset-indexing, it seems more natural to start at the next element for the next substring, or the 2nd next element when skipping one.

Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#65

Post by DarkWiiPlayer »

shakna wrote: post #20
anonymoushn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Particularly when parsing strings, it's useful if the upper bound of one substring is the lower bound of a nonoverlapping substring immediately after. For example, here's a routine to split a string into the part before the first dot and the part after: function split_dot(s) local idx = s:find(".", 1, true) if not idx then return s end return s:sub(1,idx-1), s:sub(idx+1) end It may come as a surprise that…

You wouldn't end up with this: s:sub(0, #s) You would end up with: s:sub(0, #s - 1) Which demonstrates the off-by-one error.

unless the fantasy-lua went all the way and `#` returned the offset of the last element, that is, the length minus one

Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#66

Post by lispm »

groovy2shoes wrote: post #60
Feolkin wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. Lisp does 0-based indexing. Lisp predates C and C-like languages by decades.

They don't say that C was the first. The claim is that C's influence was responsible for the proliferation. (Bit of a tangent: Lisp predates C by at most 2 years if you count McCarthy's original 1960 paper, but afaict their respective implementations both got their first public distribution in 1962. Of course, Lisp was set to gain momentum from that time until the AI winter, while C was practically confined to UNIX u…

C wasn't from 1972? Basically a decade later?

Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#67

Post by anonymoushn »

DarkWiiPlayer wrote: post #62
snazz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s unfortunate that Lua makes some strange decisions, but the powerful functionality totally outweighs the weirdness (metatables are especially cool). I really like Lua, especially for game programming with LÖVE.

"strange" in the sense of different from other languages in 2020, yes, but not strange from the perspective of its developers. Lua is a language for both hardcore C programmers and complete n00bs wanting to configure their C programs. In that context, position-based indexing makes much more sense, as it's how most non-programmers think.

I find it strange that you choose to use terminology that does not uniquely identify what you are talking about when the rest of the thread uses terminology that does uniquely identify what they are talking about

Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#68

Post by brainbag »

wastedhours wrote: post #52
kirillzubovsky wrote: post #3

I've never heard of Lua, but now that I am looking at it, it seems very friendly. Love how they call things what they are, for example `local` is just a local variable, or `repeat X until Y` for a loop. It's a joy to see, to be honest.

The Defold game engine (recently spun back out of King) uses Lua as the main language [0] [0] https://defold.com/manuals/lua/

They also open sourced it and created a new organization, the Defold Foundation, to own it. I have built commercial games but only some incomplete side projects with Defold, Corona, and Love2D.

Of the three I thought Defold was the best and was supported by a company of commercial game developers. If I were going to start today it would be my top one to consider.

Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#69

Post by xorcist »

brainbag wrote: post #68
wastedhours wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Defold game engine (recently spun back out of King) uses Lua as the main language [0] [0] https://defold.com/manuals/lua/

They also open sourced it and created a new organization, the Defold Foundation, to own it. I have built commercial games but only some incomplete side projects with Defold, Corona, and Love2D. Of the three I thought Defold was the best and was supported by a company of commercial game developers. If I were going to start today it would be my top one to consider.

They didn't open source it. There was a (righteous) flamefest among the HN comments upon the announcement and they had to retract that part.

Don't let that stop you using the software of course, as long as you have knowledge of the actual license being used.

Re: I open sourced my game along with a tutorial on how to make it using Lua

#70

Post by soapdog »

cl3misch wrote: post #58
gauchojs wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decade ago, I thought Lua would be where JS is today. But JS won... A new text editor in Lua, why not: https://github.com/rxi/lite (Rxi is awesome, see https://rxi.itch.io/ )

rxi indeed is awesome! Do you know in what language/engine his (her?) tools on itch.io are written? They all have an awesome pixelart look to them and I wonder if (s)he uses lua for them too.

also, just a sidenote which you might already be aware of, a lot of itch.io used to be written in Lua. Check out Moonscript, A language that is like the coffeescript of Lua (https://moonscript.org), and Lapis which is a web framework (https://leafo.net/lapis/) that can use Lua or Moonscript. Itch.io used to be built with both, I don't know if that remains true today.
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