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Is SCUMM really better than Lua?

No. I've used SCUMM, was the core systems engineer on Grim, and founded Telltale. I'm very familiar with both. The spirit of SCUMM is very much alive, but SCUMM is a system, not just a language. Lua runs circles around SCUMM as a language (SCUMM didn't support >8bit numeric types till Monkey3!), but as a game development system SCUMM was really cool. There's much that Unreal, Unity, etc could learn from it, but "running circles around Lua" is (ahem) hyperbole.

That's what I thought. I wonder what the DSL used in Grim and Escape from Monkey Island looked like.

Also, the Lua version used in Grim was 2.5 (!) and a major issue was the lack of cooperative multithreading (see http://www.grimfandango.net/?page=articles&pagenumber=2).

I don't know what version was used in Escape from Monkey Isand (3.1 ?), but the current version of Lua also "runs in circles" around the Lua that was used in those games.

EDIT: more by Bret on Lua in Grim: http://www.slideshare.net/hughreynolds/lua-patient-zero-bret...

Thanks for your work on Grim. It's the reason I learned Lua (via LuaDec and extracting code out of the .LAB files), and I play it at least once a year.

From what I've read about SCUMM, it was designed to be very similar to writing a regular script for, say, a TV show. The famous "hamster in the microwave" sequence was conceived, planned and implemented in one afternoon, and it even included some form of multitasking. Just by reading a piece of code such as this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SLVyjUCOIo&t=0m10s) you get a sense of what is going on, and that makes trying ideas really simple.

You probably wouldn't use SCUMM for anything except an adventure game, but in that particular case I think it would be much better than a general-purpose language as LUA.

From what I've read about SCUMM, it was designed to be very similar to writing a regular script for, say, a TV show.

There's a programming language for writing textual interactive fiction games, Inform 7 ( http://inform7.com/ ), which reads as a natural language. For example, here's part of the "programme" of a game (copied from http://www.hpiweb.com/newmedia/i7/cbrk/source.html )

The Forest is a room. "This forest is cold and damp. Sunset is drawing very near and shelter must be found soon. The only apparent direction to go is north." A room called Before the Castle of the Big Red Key is north of the Forest. "The castle looms before you. Its massive front door has a lock that seems to glow a fiery red. You must continue north past that door. The only other exit is to the south." The big_red_key is here. The description is "It's a big red key." The printed name is "big red key". Understand "big", "red", and "key" as the big_red_key. It unlocks the massive front doorway. The massive front doorway is north of Before the Castle of the Big Red Key and south of the Castle Vestibule. The doorway is a door.

It would be interesting to have a graphical equivalent.

I wouldn't call Inform 7 a programming language, so much as a DSL for entering fact-tuples into a graph database (though some of these tuples do attach "rules" [predefined functions] together using AOP join-points). When you actually need to tell it how to "make things happen", you basically break out into a separate, imperative programming language--which happens to be I7's ancestor, I6.

I know only a little of Inform 7. I somehow thought it was as full featured as Inform 6. What can you do in I6 that you can't do in I7?

It's interesting that Ron Gilbert originally wanted to base SCUMM on Lisp: http://www.pagetable.com/?p=614

Of the few SCUMM script examples I've seen, I can't seem to understand what Gilbert means when he says: "It did things Lua could never dream of." The ability to control a C64 from a UNIX box? That actually sounds a lot like Naughty Dog's GOAL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp

I think you have to interpret that snide remark as tongue-in-cheek; he also says SCUMM beat up Lua for its lunch money. And he is playing that "grumpy old developer" role pretty consistently, which means bashing the new and venerating the old. Still, I think his main point is that SCUMM was a higher-level language than Lua that could express actions in a more game-specific form, and that's why it's more suitable (at least to his way of doing things), and that's why he would like to continue the SCUMM way rather than actually use Lua.

If I have understood it correctly, he also means that using SCUMM is fun by itself, so it just puts you in the right mood.

I think the question you meant to ask was: "Is SCUMM really better than Lua for the rapid/(agile?) development of 2d adventure games?"

And according to one experienced source (OP): The answer is a resounding "yes"!

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