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Welcome to 2005 :) Last week I didn't get much code done and run in a couple of problems
with Lua and the hardest part about it: debugging lua scripts called from c#.
Over the weekend I even tested if it might be worth to switch to Python
and tested out the IronPython implementation and written some Python test
programs. Python has definitely much more powerful libraries than lua and
you can do great stuff with it, the OOP is also much nicer than writing
Lua code and having to worry about every . : ] ) and } symbol much more
than in any other script language I know of. But Python and especially
IronPython is not only a total overkill for a small application and trying
to get something quickly to work, the language has also a lot of
disadvantages when comparing to Lua. Its not only very large and complex
and therefore much harder to learn, but to get something working is
much more complicated on the c# side. I also think Lua is much more
customable and allows modifying much lower level methods and calls.
Ok, so I skipped that idea and returned back to Lua and finished the
EffectManager on the Lua side making only a couple of calls to c#.
This did not only help to learn more about Lua and scripting, but I
also improved the c# engine very much and spend a lot of time simplifying
code of the engine. Creating textures, making unit tests, error handling,
etc. all got much easier (this comes when working with Lua and then looking
at c# code and thinking everything is overly complicated). Anyways,
Ivo and Fabian didn't do much either on the game and so we got stuck
in the development and started today again and made a new schedule to
finish the game at the end of next week. We will include some left out ideas and
have gotten some new improvements on the game, the editor and some units.
Ivo did also start some new objects (buildings and enemy units), there might
be some fresh graphics for that soon.
Over the chrismas and new years eve weekends I read some more
of my Lua and Rapid development books and yesterday I started reading Code
Generation in .NET by Kathleen Dollard, which is also very interessting
and got me in a lot of thinking how to improve coding in general (not only
using scripts and code generation techiques, but going 1 step ahead and
create new ways to handle coding and reusing existing code).
Well, first of all Lost Squadron has to be finished :-)
Useful links today:
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Day 16:
This screenshots shows my Lua EffectManager rendering effects with help of
c# classes (this is just a small unit test testing some effects), it
is very fast and calling Lua up to 20 times a frame produces still over
500 fps in debug mode and won't slow down the game at all (using Lua is goooood ^^).
I wasn't posting updates since the last week because there wasn't much going
on to produce fancy screenshots and I worked at other stuff (internal
parts of the engine and Lua scripting). I will now try to post a screenshot at
least every 2 days or so. Tomorrow I will hopefully finish the unit
shooting and exploding part and post a ingame screenshot again. |