Language performance :

[Roland]

Stange after browsing some LE3 Topics i've found this :

 

BlitzMax and LE3

 

So it seems BlitzMax will continue to be used for LE3 ?

Yes. The difference is that LE2 i coded in BlitzMax. LE3 is coded in C++.

The engine.dll will be usable by BlitzMax, C# and other languages that can import DLL's.

[Canardia]

So why saying it is dead ? if if is finished stable, without critic bugs, and even with no more support,

if it works great , and it is even used on LEE 3 , and also for the coding of the editor ;

With dead I mean that BRL is focussing fully on Monkey development, and not developing BlitzMax much further, perhaps some bug fixes and small feature additions only. It's being phased out.

[Paul Thomas]

With dead I mean that BRL is focussing fully on Monkey development, and not developing BlitzMax much further, perhaps some bug fixes and small feature additions only. It's being phased out.

Sounds like LE2, lol.

[Pixel Perfect]

I should give this a try just to see how it works in Lua. Putting it on the GPU would be sweet and pretty much negate any language speed talk I would assume. I'll play around with the 200x200 thing in Lua if I get some time tonight. Should be easy enough to setup the example as just data with no visuals and test the time just so we don't all guess at this kind of stuff and it keeps coming up again and again.

Did you ever get round to trying this Rick, some comparison stats would be nice to see!

[Rick]

I didn't yet. Between getting stealth working for my game and hanging with the family I didn't have enough time this weekend. I also wanted to use my board but scale it and still have the tiles the same size for the test, but with my new Win 7 I don't have my 3DWS key anymore and that's what I used for the board and texture scaling. I have an email in with Josh to see if he could get me that but haven't heard back from him yet.

[Pixel Perfect]

Yeah, that's OK Rick. I have to do the same balancing act all the time. Would be handy if you manage to find the time at some point though, just so we can finally make some knowledgeable statements about the performance of Lua in these situations rather than the guestimates we currently tend to use and better advise people.

 

I know Soamp wrote a lot of code in Lua initially and was experiencing some major performance issues, I don't recollect what the outcome of that was if indeed he ever told us?

[Canardia]

My robot game was too slow in Lua, so I had to port it to C++. The math calculations and iterations for the physics forces for the 8 limbs of each of the 40 robots took like 20 FPS in Lua, and in C++ they take only 1 FPS.

[YouGroove]

Perhaps all physic and math Calculation shoud remain in a C++ DLL for example instead on Lua precompiled code i think.

Sure that 1 or 20 FPS is not the same thing indeed.

[Canardia]

Yeah, the Lua implementaion of LE2 alone is not enough to make real games, but you need either the source license to add more features to Lua, or the possibility to load C++ DLLs from Lua.

[YouGroove]

@Metatron :

I think it's like some commercial games using LUA !

You have the expensive parts of code like path Finding, physic simulation , formulas for something put in C++ and you have all the rest for Lua.

Some good bunch of commercial games have been using it, so i think it's a good choice for concentrate on game making than coding !

[Canardia]

Sure, it's completely possible to make a game in Lua that way. And I think Rick managed to get a .NET DLL to load in Lua, so it should work with a real C++ DLL too.