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Grid – A Lua Game Engine

planimeter.org

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Re: Grid – A Lua Game Engine

#31

Post by andrewmcwatters »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #26
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #20

Thank you for posting this, Bambo! I was curious why we were seeing 10s of new stars all of a sudden and trying to figure out where the GitHubbers were coming from. Grid Engine 9 is now the largest pure-Lua game engine on GitHub. As s_y_n_t_a_x has mentioned in this thread, I built the Grid Engine on top of LÖVE. I came from the hlcoders world, having used the Source Engine for several years, and was upset the 2D wor…

I also saw this on your repo [1], I was wondering if you are planning to move from Love to it, or what is it about? (just curious :-) 1: https://github.com/Planimeter/lgf

A few casual notes, though I could continue to expand on this:

lgameframework is a project I took on some time ago to provide a LuaJIT FFI alternative to LÖVE. It helped educate me on what was necessary to interact directly with the OpenGL layer, and understand what challenges the LÖVE developers will have in the distant future with OpenGL being deprecated on macOS. (Will they move to bgfx? Or Vulkan/MoltenVK? Who knows. Ask Alex, I suppose.)

As an interesting side note, it does things LÖVE doesn't, which may or may not be interesting depending on whether or not you think first-party 3D features, PBR, VR (See also LÖVR) are desirable in a pure Lua project.

It also serves as a hatch door project I hope I never have to use. Valve broke Source for modders somewhere between the 2007 and 2013 engine branches with SteamPipe, and the idea that you could spend literal years on a project and have some developer break your work in Bellevue was scary to me. They don't have the same respect for the modding community today that they did maybe 15 or so years back. I don't think that's going to change, unfortunately, but I'm digressing.

I trust the LÖVE team, and appreciate that it's FOSS software, but I need full control over the stack I present to developers using the Grid Engine, and I need to respect users by not breaking things.

In the event LÖVE breaks things, the Grid Engine needs to be patched to account for those changes, and Grid has been around long enough to see this happen a small number of times. I think the changes have been reasonable so far, but mature projects will inevitably end up with deprecation notices and backwards compat patches, and that's where we are now.

lgameframework is defensive software, but I'd rather continue to promote LÖVE. The only issue I see with this, and cannot condone however, are the libraries that have come out of the community with inappropriate names.

Edit: I apologize that all of this sounds a bit dark, that's not my intention, but a lot of people's hard work can be at stake. Implementors of such software need to defend their users. The LÖVE developers have created something wonderful, and I must reiterate this.

I plan on Grid being around for years to come, which means you have to start thinking about protecting that mote. Planimeter projects have been in the works since 2010. I work in a narrow subset of the gamedev space, and don't plan on stopping any time soon. It will be my life's work.

Re: Grid – A Lua Game Engine

#32

Post by CreepGin »

kroltan wrote: post #17
rishav_sharan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, these are the main reasons; 1. Embeddability. You can create a game engine in a performant systems language like c++ and embed lua in it for the scripting. 2. Speed. The lua interpreter is much faster than python in general. When you throw luajit into the fix, they are not really comparable at all. 3. simplicity: lua is tiny. and one of the easier languages for non coders (game designers, artists) to get started…

To be clear: Python does have embeddability, but it is orders of magnitude more complicated to integrate.

Hehe, hence the word "embeddability" instead of "embeddable".

Re: Grid – A Lua Game Engine

#33

Post by Bayart »

grawprog wrote: post #30
ebg13 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring metatable weirdness, I think "you need to throw out most of what you know" is quite wrong. The main thing you need to know is that Lua's table type can be numerically iterated between index 1 and the first gap where numeric index has nil value using the ipairs iterator in addition to the non-exclusively-numeric unordered pairs iterator. A common pitfall with sparse tables is that the length shortcut # return…

Lua's lack of integer support caused me some issues. Using floor() around everything wasn't really an ideal solution and I ended up changing languages for that project. Metatables are cool, but have some weirdness to them. For OOP i ended up using metatables to make a simple prototype(rather than class) based system, but it was hacky at best. Tables themselves are pretty awesome and powerful, but I have to admit, wor…

You talking about Solarus Engine rang a bell for me as I wondered if it had anything to do with Zelda Solarus, a fan game I played fifteen years ago and what introduced me to RPG Maker. And it does ! It's really heart warming to see people follow through with their own projects for so long, Thanks for the throwback !

Re: Grid – A Lua Game Engine

#34

Post by andrewmcwatters »

grawprog wrote: post #30
ebg13 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring metatable weirdness, I think "you need to throw out most of what you know" is quite wrong. The main thing you need to know is that Lua's table type can be numerically iterated between index 1 and the first gap where numeric index has nil value using the ipairs iterator in addition to the non-exclusively-numeric unordered pairs iterator. A common pitfall with sparse tables is that the length shortcut # return…

Lua's lack of integer support caused me some issues. Using floor() around everything wasn't really an ideal solution and I ended up changing languages for that project. Metatables are cool, but have some weirdness to them. For OOP i ended up using metatables to make a simple prototype(rather than class) based system, but it was hacky at best. Tables themselves are pretty awesome and powerful, but I have to admit, wor…

Solarus is such an interesting engine in that it's almost certainly more powerful than Defold, but its focus on making a Zelda-like game engine probably makes it harder for users to see how it can be reused for other works.

Re: Grid – A Lua Game Engine

#35

Post by symmitchry »

EamonnMR wrote: post #28
symmitchry wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Python have any good game engines? PyGame project is a nightmare. Lua's https://love2d.org/ is amazing.

I'm curious as to what you found nightmareish about Pygame... It's SDL.

Years of being extremely difficult to run on a Mac (no pip install), horrible website update (the old one was bad, but at least it was cool & functional), and on-going issues like this: https://github.com/pygame/pygame/issues/555

There's not even a note on the website that it's entirely broken in Mojave. It's just _always_ something.

Compared to LOVE and numerous other projects which just worked right out of the box. I'm a total Python guy, but Pygame has always been frustrating.

Re: Grid – A Lua Game Engine

#36

Post by pier25 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #20

Thank you for posting this, Bambo! I was curious why we were seeing 10s of new stars all of a sudden and trying to figure out where the GitHubbers were coming from. Grid Engine 9 is now the largest pure-Lua game engine on GitHub. As s_y_n_t_a_x has mentioned in this thread, I built the Grid Engine on top of LÖVE. I came from the hlcoders world, having used the Source Engine for several years, and was upset the 2D wor…

Why Lua and not say Haxe? Because of LÖVE?

Re: Grid – A Lua Game Engine

#37

Post by andrewmcwatters »

pier25 wrote: post #36
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #20

Thank you for posting this, Bambo! I was curious why we were seeing 10s of new stars all of a sudden and trying to figure out where the GitHubbers were coming from. Grid Engine 9 is now the largest pure-Lua game engine on GitHub. As s_y_n_t_a_x has mentioned in this thread, I built the Grid Engine on top of LÖVE. I came from the hlcoders world, having used the Source Engine for several years, and was upset the 2D wor…

Why Lua and not say Haxe? Because of LÖVE?

Yes, primarily. But the real answer is because of Lua from Garry's Mod, and the design of the engine is heavily inspired by Source and QuakeWorld. Even today, I still believe Quake is one of the most elegantly designed game codebases in existence.

Planimeter was formerly called Team Sandbox, and we were a group of developers working on a game called Half-Life 2: Sandbox, which was a FOSS alternative to Garry's Mod that stayed Half-Life themed.

The team is comprised of mostly different volunteers now.

Re: Grid – A Lua Game Engine

#38

Post by scythe »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #9
Kataphract wrote: post #2

Why do people use Lua in a world where we have Python?

IMO, these are the main reasons; 1. Embeddability. You can create a game engine in a performant systems language like c++ and embed lua in it for the scripting. 2. Speed. The lua interpreter is much faster than python in general. When you throw luajit into the fix, they are not really comparable at all. 3. simplicity: lua is tiny. and one of the easier languages for non coders (game designers, artists) to get started…

To add to this, Lua has a thread-safe interpreter, which allows running multiple Lua threads in the same process. This contrasts with Python's GIL.

Re: Grid – A Lua Game Engine

#39

Post by nonbirithm »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #20

Thank you for posting this, Bambo! I was curious why we were seeing 10s of new stars all of a sudden and trying to figure out where the GitHubbers were coming from. Grid Engine 9 is now the largest pure-Lua game engine on GitHub. As s_y_n_t_a_x has mentioned in this thread, I built the Grid Engine on top of LÖVE. I came from the hlcoders world, having used the Source Engine for several years, and was upset the 2D wor…

Would you happen to know of any games that use Grid?

If so, it would be nice to list them on the homepage.

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