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grim fandango was written in lua? :O

...and Far Cry, and Baldur's Gate, and WoW, and Angry Birds, and...

Lua is ubiquitous in game programming (as a scripting language), see e.g.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lua-scripted_video_gam... or browse through some game programming related job openings.

I wish is a little bit more ubiquitous everywhere else. It's a great language and would have been a far better Javascript!

I always liken Lua to "JavaScript, with all the bad parts removed".

I should have added "already", I know lua is very common now, I didn't know it was common in 1997.

It was AFAIK the first game to use Lua, and it influenced the rest of the industry.

Note that before that, Lucasarts had a custom execution environment for their games, for portability reasons (SCUMM). Grim Fandango uses GrimE, sort of a successor to that.

I would assume that LUA was a way to move towards something common as a scripting language in GrimE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUMM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LucasArts_adventure_games#3D_gr...

Ah yes:

"Soon after the article in Dr. Dobb's, we received several messages about Lua. One of the first messages was the following:"

    From: Bret Mogilefsky <mogul@lucasarts.com>
    To: "'lua@icad.puc-rio.br'" <lua@icad.puc-rio.br>
    Subject: LUA rocks!  Question, too.
    Date: Thu, 9 Jan 1997 13:21:41 -0800
 
    Hi there...
 
    After reading the Dr. Dobbs article on Lua I was very eager to check it
    out, and so far it has exceeded my expectations in every way!  It's
    elegance and simplicity astound me.  Congratulations on developing such
    a well-thought out language.
 
    Some background: I am working on an adventure game for the LucasArts
    Entertainment Co., and I want to try replacing our older adventure game
    scripting language, SCUMM, with Lua.

    [...]

http://www.lua.org/history.html

They weren't quite "written" in lua, but more had their higher level logic (events, stats, game logic) scripted in lua.

It's kind of a small point, I just don't want somebody to get the idea to write an actual game engine in lua.

the game engine was likely c++, and the scripts (Fx, behaviors, etc) were in Lua. It's a common setup.

my surprise was that this was true 17 years ago :)

Lua is 20 years old :)

My brother had a demo of Grim Fandango in a ZIP archive, and it didn't include the Lua DLL. When we reran it years later, we first had to recompile Lua (3.1?) before the game would run.

That's how I learned it was using Lua. I believe it was the first large scale use of Lua in a game, certainly the first I encountered.

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