Does LeadWerks let you modify/update Lua?

[The Deer]

I understand Leadwerks lets you modify a lot of things in C++, but just asking if I could also mess with the Lua implementation? Maybe backport a few libraries, modify some syntax if I wanted or just take some work to update the whole lang to 5.3 and try to carry over Leadwerks specific additions to the new language?

[Josh]

With the pro version you could create your own Lua implementation, but if you are asking can you change Lua around and keep the Leadwerks Lua features, the answer is no.

Leadwerks 5 will update Lua to the latest (5.3) and will no longer use LuaJIT.

[thehankinator]

On 9/8/2017 at 1:44 AM, Josh said:

With the pro version you could create your own Lua implementation, but if you are asking can you change Lua around and keep the Leadwerks Lua features, the answer is no.

Leadwerks 5 will update Lua to the latest (5.3) and will no longer use LuaJIT.

Have you profiled Lua vs LuaJIT in Leadwerks? I'm curious if there will be performance impact. LuaJIT comparison tool claims pretty substantial gains over regular Lua (http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html).

[Josh]

9 hours ago, thehankinator said:

Have you profiled Lua vs LuaJIT in Leadwerks? I'm curious if there will be performance impact. LuaJIT comparison tool claims pretty substantial gains over regular Lua (http://luajit.org/performance_x86.html).

Regular Lua is slower than LuaJIT but the LuaJIT project is no longer being developed and You will get more time in the game loop in Leadwerks 5 for your code to execute, since rendering and physics are performed in separate threads.  LuaJIT is stuck at Lua 5.14 which does not support unicode.

[martyj]

18 hours ago, Josh said:

Regular Lua is slower than LuaJIT but the LuaJIT project is no longer being developed and You will get more time in the game loop in Leadwerks 5 for your code to execute, since rendering and physics are performed in separate threads.  LuaJIT is stuck at Lua 5.14 which does not support unicode.

Does this mean we can have an animated loading screen now?

[Josh]

4 hours ago, martyj said:

Does this mean we can have an animated loading screen now?

Unrelated, but I am planning on asynchronous loading of assets, which means you can render to the screen on one thread while a map loads on another thread.

[shadmar]

This is interesting, so I can create models and surfaces and normalize in code on one thread and when done (like big terrain patches on my planet renderer), I will render it on the "rendering" thread? If so it would be quite awesome!

[Josh]

On 9/16/2017 at 0:58 PM, shadmar said:

This is interesting, so I can create models and surfaces and normalize in code on one thread and when done (like big terrain patches on my planet renderer), I will render it on the "rendering" thread? If so it would be quite awesome!

Probably.  I think we're going to have a SurfaceBuilder() class and surfaces themselves won't be modifiable.

[The Deer]

On 9/8/2017 at 3:44 AM, Josh said:

With the pro version you could create your own Lua implementation, but if you are asking can you change Lua around and keep the Leadwerks Lua features, the answer is no.

Leadwerks 5 will update Lua to the latest (5.3) and will no longer use LuaJIT.

Cool. I bought the pro version a few weeks ago and will be patiently waiting for Leadwerks 5 before I begin transitioning to the engine.

[Josh]

On 9/21/2017 at 2:51 AM, The Deer said:

Cool. I bought the pro version a few weeks ago and will be patiently waiting for Leadwerks 5 before I begin transitioning to the engine.

Leadwerks 5 will not be production-ready for quite some time so you may want to make your next game in Leadwerks 4.x, which will remain stable.