Raph is no longer taunting us (Metaplace)

[SnakeCharmer]

How many Kaa are there?

In Meatplace, as many as you can MeatImaginate^tm

Fix0red.

[WindupAtheist]

Me and my guildmate's zombie graphical MUD will own.  Or it will suck.  Probably it will suck.  But what the hell?

[cmlancas]

You made no reference to your love of trammel. I'm disappointed.

[WayAbvPar]

I don't know why some people are so upset with other people signing their posts.

The fierce warrior pictured in your sig is probably enough to scare off the midgets. The rest of you are fucked.

[tazelbain]

Ah, Trippy haxxored my leet thread title.  Maybe the midgets were mind-controlling him?

[Yegolev]

Did anyone here muck around in MOOs as children?

No such animal when I was a children.  However I used bricks as buildings and bulldozers in my backyard, which is probably about the same thing.

Yegolev

[JWIV]

Did anyone here muck around in MOOs as children? I had one when I was younger where we made pokemans bots. I think I was 12.

Why did GMOOs get pushed to the side for so long?

CMLANCAS

If by children you mean, my freshman year of college then yah.  I had more than enough LP Mudding to last a lifetime.   I dicked around with some TinyMUSH and MUX later.   

[Raph]

For the geeks:

"Scripting Philosophy"
http://www.metaplace.com/blog/11.html

Oh, and public forums are live there.

[Musashi]

The alien is better.

[Margalis]

I'm not familiar with Lua but the syntax looks old and gross.

[Trippy]

Lua isn't OO.

[naum]

For the geeks:

"Scripting Philosophy"
http://www.metaplace.com/blog/11.html

Oh, and public forums are live there.

Wonder why Lua was selected over Python (or even Javascript)…

Guess I should ask this on Meatplace…

[Margalis]

To elaborate, and this is probably my inner snob talking, any language that has "if...elseif...then" constructs looks like easy-mode to me.

Aslo a lot of people know Javascript/Actionscript, if you want to make it easy why not choose a language that many are already familiar with? It doesn't get any easier than using what you already know.

[tmp]

Wonder why Lua was selected over Python (or even Javascript)…

"why choose lua" ( http://www.lua.org/about.html )

Lua is a proven and robust language
Lua has been used in many industrial applications (e.g., Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom), with an emphasis on embedded systems and games. Lua is currently the leading scripting language in games. Lua has a solid reference manual and there are several books about it. Several versions of Lua have been released and used in real applications since its creation in 1993.

Lua is fast
Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. A substantial fraction of large applications have been written in Lua.

Lua is portable
Lua is distributed in a small package and builds out-of-the-box in all platforms that have an ANSI/ISO C compiler. Lua runs on all flavors of Unix and Windows, and also on mobile devices (such as handheld computers and cell phones that use BREW, Symbian, Pocket PC, etc.) and embedded microprocessors (such as ARM and Rabbit) for applications like Lego MindStorms.

Lua is embeddable
Lua is a fast language engine with small footprint that you can embed easily into your application. Lua has a simple and well documented API that allows strong integration with code written in other languages. It is easy to extend Lua with libraries written in other languages. It is also easy to extend programs written in other languages with Lua. Lua has been used to extend programs written not only in C and C++, but also in Java, C#, Smalltalk, Fortran, Ada, and even in other scripting languages, such as Perl and Ruby.

Lua is simple and powerful
A fundamental concept in the design of Lua is to provide meta-mechanisms for implementing features, instead of providing a host of features directly in the language. For example, although Lua is not a pure object-oriented language, it does provide meta-mechanisms for implementing classes and inheritance. Lua's meta-mechanisms bring an economy of concepts and keep the language small, while allowing the semantics to be extended in unconventional ways.

Lua is free
Lua is free software, distributed under a liberal license (the well-known MIT license). It can be used for both academic and commercial purposes at absolutely no cost. Just download it and use it.

re: the OO thing, Lua is not natively object oriented, but can be made so with LOOP, Lua Object Oriented Programming packages ( http://oil.luaforge.net/loop/ )

edit: also if I remember right, WoW scripting is lua-driven. So that's bunch of people already familiar with ideas of scripting MMO interfaces and language syntax and/or concepts.

[Kaa]

Lua is the "default" embedded language for a lot of things. The scripting language in WoW interface is Lua, for example.

It does sound like Metascript added some object-oriented features to Lua. That "Scripting philosophy" blog entry sounds very OO. Scripts are attached to objects and define objects' behavior, triggers are messages, commands are messages coming from the outside (and so subject to extra checks and controls). The language itself is clearly procedural, Smalltalk it ain't.

Kaa

[Samwise]

Lua isn't OO.

The system as a whole is, though.  They basically have an object-oriented framework that uses Lua to implement the methods.  Most of the code inside a C++ method implementation is indistinguishable from C.

any language that has "if...elseif...then" constructs looks like easy-mode to me.

"If" is easy mode?  What the hell do you code in, Brainfuck?

[Margalis]

Umm...Java, C, C++, C#, Javascript among others, none have if/elseif/then constructs. (Particularly the "then")

The LUA syntax looks a lot more like Pascal that something more heavy-duty and modern. There is also a distinct lack of {...} in favor of "end"

Again, that's just my inner programming snob talking, not a major critique.
---

I haven't learned a whole lot about MeatPlace with these posts, although I do appreciate them. Seems like the kind of thing that is hard to get a handle on without either a complex example or playing with it yourself for a bit.

[tmp]

Umm...Java, C, C++, C#, Javascript among others, none have if/elseif/then constructs. (Particularly the "then")

Your Java, c, C++, C# and JavaScript differ from that rest of the planet seems to know. Each of them has if/else(if) syntax.

[Samwise]

Umm...Java, C, C++, C#, Javascript among others, none have if/elseif/then constructs. (Particularly the "then")

I'd have to check on Java, but I know C/C++ has "if" and "else if".  It also has "then"; it's spelled "{".  

[Margalis]

"else if" is not the same thing as "elseif". Look carefully!

[Samwise]

They do precisely the same thing, produce the same result, can be used to create the same construct, et cetera.  Throw a "#define elseif else if" at the start of your source file and you won't know the difference.   If the exact word "elseif" without a space in it is what gives you unpleasant flashbacks, that's perfectly understandable, but your phrasing made it sound like you were condemning the entire concept of an "if" statement as being beneath you, which if true gives you the "most insanely hardcore programmer in the universe" award.   

[Kaa]

You people have weird tastes in syntactical sugar :D

Kaa

[schild]

You have a weird obsession with yourself.

schild

[Margalis]

Whenever I want to write an if statement, instead of doing "if (blah){" I do this:

for (int i =0; i<1 && blah; i++){

}

True story!

No, seriously, I just meant the combination of if, else, elseif and then together. You really only need if and else, except that without braces you need a lot more Pascal-like keywords.

[tmp]

No, seriously, I just meant the combination of if, else, elseif and then together. You really only need if and else, except that without braces you need a lot more Pascal-like keywords.

Ahh I see. For Lua this is probably because braces are used as table constructors so they cannot double as block indicators (funnily enough Lua tables are objects rather than C/Pascal-like arrays)  The 'elseif' thing is there simply for people who'd prefer to simplify the if ... then ... end else if ... then ... end else if ... then ... end chains but not obligatory by any means, you can always pretend it doesn't exist. 

[naum]

Whenever I want to write an if statement, instead of doing "if (blah){" I do this:

for (int i =0; i<1 && blah; i++){

}

True story!

No, seriously, I just meant the combination of if, else, elseif and then together. You really only need if and else, except that without braces you need a lot more Pascal-like keywords.

Ruby is so much more elegant…

Code:

list.each {|n| n.do_something}

[Yoru]

Real men(tm) use bar magnets to flip instruction bits directly into RAM, and the increment the instruction pointer manually.

Uphill.

BOTH WAYS.

IN THE SNOW.

[BigBlack]

Waitasecond.

Lua is used in Lego MindStorms.. Metaplace places an emphasis on device interoperability...  perhaps someone could pull off a metaspace with a robot gladiator arena that allows you to control and fight RL lego mindstorms in some dudes house somewhere...

I think anyone who tries to estimate where metaplace will stop being interesting, at this stage in the game, will see the platform achieve things they didnt expect.

[Steve Crews]

Funny that you name drop F13 in the interview, because it seems like he was reading this thread when he made his prep questions.

Actually, I'm not a real big fan of message boards (I found the link to this thread in the server logs). Though, I don't discount the possibility of someone I asked for suggestions reading it.

If anyone is in the market for additional Metaplace infoz, I'm currently putting the finishing touches on the companion piece to the interview, my office visit writeup. It will have further information about the editor (one of them, at least), the Flash client, the games I saw demod, and my overall impressions of the system in general.

[Soln]

I spent some time using LUA for some WoW mods.  More time deciphering how they work, since Blizz doesn't support their API (it was all player documented). 

The biggest problems with LUA IMO is data driven apps -- it is way slow.  Slow, like the old VB collection control kind of slow.  Simple things like there are no pointers (obviously, so no chance of an iterator class -- and no classes at all), but even more importantly, there were no data structures supported than I saw that might even work robustly.  For instance, I think there is a "table" kind of object, but it's more like a multi-dimensional vector -- like an array, where each increment can be an index of an other table (I think). 

Regardless of that, whether people are going to store info on the fly in their code or not, there still has to be some very real database connection libs, and I didn't see any in LUA.  I may be wrong, but I doubt it.  That work has to be supplied, and I will be interested to see how they do it.  If they were smart, since they will only charge for hosting I think, they should use the MSQL 5x libs which are technically free and technically very robust (although not for the light hearted).  If they don't, I don't know how people will have "persistence" in their games.

[Kaa]

there still has to be some very real database connection libs, and I didn't see any in LUA.

Lua is a language. The language is different from the libraries available. Lua is built to be embeddable which means it's quite good at interoperating with code written in other languages.

In any case, I'd be VERY surprised if MetaScript doesn't come with a full set of database APIs and the platform doesn't provide a database by default. Virtual worlds without databases are... let's say hard to make.

Kaa

[naum]

there still has to be some very real database connection libs, and I didn't see any in LUA.

Lua is a language. The language is different from the libraries available. Lua is built to be embeddable which means it's quite good at interoperating with code written in other languages.

In any case, I'd be VERY surprised if MetaScript doesn't come with a full set of database APIs and the platform doesn't provide a database by default. Virtual worlds without databases are... let's say hard to make.

Kaa

Some tidbits from the official Meatplace blog…
http://www.metaplace.com/blog/11.html

NinjaInhibitor said:

Why lua instead of an "OO" language? There are many reasons why we picked lua, and why MetaScript is not really an object-oriented framework from the world builder's perspective. Lua is pretty advanced in terms of language features - it allows you to implement class-like data structures and objects, so we don't really lose anything in direction. If you dig into the Lua community and architecture, you'll discover it compares well with more common scripting languages. It doesnt have a large standard library like Python or PHP, but for an embedded environment like the MetaServer that is actually an advantage. There is less to "take out" of the APIs exposed to users.
on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 2:58 PM PDT:

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Tide said:

This is Sean Riley of the Python game dev books?

How are you guys going to manage data? What kind of connection libs will be available to what kinds of databases? Cause there's nothing in LUA to manage data driven apps.
on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 4:08 PM PDT:

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NinjaInhibitor said:

Yes, the very same Sean Riley!

Oh, there will be data, there will be lots of data. In MetaScript, there are user-configurable data objects called Templates that live in the game's stylesheet. I mentioned them briefly above. These are for meta-data (no pun intended) - they are for defining types of parameterizable game objects and behaviors. Then, when the game is running "game objects" can be instanced from templates.

It is a very data-driven system. At the risk of invoking meta-fatigue, I'd even say it was a MetaData-driven system.
on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 5:35 PM PDT:

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m3mnoch said:

for those of you who missed the irony there, the guy who literally wrote the book on game programming with python chose lua for our metascript. and for very deliberate reasons, no less.

sounds like a ringing endorsement of lua for what we needed, eh?

m3mnoch.

[Quinton]

Umm...Java, C, C++, C#, Javascript among others, none have if/elseif/then constructs. (Particularly the "then")

The LUA syntax looks a lot more like Pascal that something more heavy-duty and modern. There is also a distinct lack of {...} in favor of "end"

The syntax is Lua's biggest downfall.  It is a *wonderful* embedded language.  Very light, clean, easy to integrate.  Clever little VM and runtime environment.  The pascal-ish syntax is a little gross, but probably the most obnoxious thing is:

foo.bar(foo)  vs  foo:bar()

The latter is syntactic sugar for the former and it is *really* easy for people writing scripts to get them mixed up and end up with really odd results that can be frustrating to debug.

- Q

[tmp]

but even more importantly, there were no data structures supported than I saw that might even work robustly.  For instance, I think there is a "table" kind of object, but it's more like a multi-dimensional vector -- like an array, where each increment can be an index of an other table (I think).

Table is kinda different things depending on what you need it to be -- if you define just values, it's an array. If you associate keys with your values, then it becomes something akin to a set. The catch is it can hold any sort of data as value so you can have table that holds pair of floats then a string and them maybe another table or whatever. Don't know how they implemented it under the hood, but in any case deeming it robust or not without checking at all how it goes in practice seems bit premature.

[CharlieMopps]

Hey Raph, I signed up for your website... what's the deal?!?! The only language option there is, is "British English"
wtf? All I know in British English is "Right-o" and "Spot-o-Tea"
Couldn't you at least include a Canadian-English option? The translation is much easier.