LUAJohn Imboden

What is Lua

Embeddable scripting language Creators: Roberto Lerusalimschy, Luiz

Henrique de Figueiredo, and Waldemar Celes

Designed using a bottom up design scheme

Originally developed as a tool for business applications (mainly data entry)

Why I chose Lua

Significant titlesWorld of WarcraftSim City 4Adobe Photoshop LightroomWarhammer Online: Age of ReckoningFarCry

What can Lua do?

Lua’s use in the gaming industryUser InterfacesAi scriptsGame animations

Example UI

Limits of Lua?

Lua is highly customizable

Lua has a high overhead if data is declared improperly

Pros of Lua

Highly Portable

Extremely easy to incorporate in C or C++

No need to recompile while debugging

Familiar syntax for those used to C

Cons of Lua

Memory management

Out of the box debugging is lacking

Global Variables

Evaluation

Readability

Writeability

Reliability

Cost

References

Slide 1: image from http://lua.org

Slide 2: http://lua.org/history.html

Slide 3: http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaUses

Slide 7-8: http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/18285/what-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-incorporating-lua-into-a-c-game