script in pascal ?

**jdarling** · 15-08-2007, 12:34 PM

I'm with Paul here, Lua is one of the best scripting engines and its well known in the game community. Thus its more likely that you can pickup modders and scripters for it. Pascal Script for Delphi (from RemObjects) is also quite good. DWSII is just too dated to be used anymore.

Up sides of Lua:
Cross platform
Well known
Excellent documentation and support
Its the only script engine in the TIOBE top 20 languages

Down sides:
Right now you have to use a DLL version, though I'm porting to FPC

Anyways, I have a small "Game Engine" sample on my website that uses Lua in a Lazarus project along with SDL. I have the updated Lua headers in the project to support Lua 5.1 (latest "stable" release). I'm also working on a new version called pLua that will have better support and many bug fixes for using Lua in Pascal (more on this soon). Of course, the end goal of pLua is to completely port Lua to pascal

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Anyways, enough rambling, download: http://eonclash.com/ViewProduct.php?ProductID=23

**Robert Kosek** · 15-08-2007, 02:10 PM

JDarling forgot to mention the downside that Lua has a steep learning curve when working with it in your project. Not in coding in Lua, but binding things to Lua. I never could get it to work decently, which is why I prefer to avoid it altogether.

**jdarling** · 15-08-2007, 05:42 PM

Originally Posted by Robert Kosek

JDarling forgot to mention the downside that Lua has a steep learning curve when working with it in your project. Not in coding in Lua, but binding things to Lua. I never could get it to work decently, which is why I prefer to avoid it altogether.

Soon thats not going to be as big of a deal. I've managed to fix a lot of things with the new version. Granted I had to break it so that most of the older stuff isn't a straight conversion

. I also discovered (while writing the articles for Lua Gems) that I was doing some things WRONG (imagine that)!

Only time, and the final release of v1, will tell though. And I have to admit that Lua isn't the easiest thing to wrap up in Delphi. Still, I'm of the opinion that if your looking for a game where players will Mod it an existing established scripting language is the way to go

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**Robert Kosek** · 15-08-2007, 06:02 PM

That will be nice. Mostly the problem was in both mangling the stack and in assigning function bindings. Unlike "procedure of object" for a type declaration that is passable, the functions didn't want an address. So, I got lost and it was "what learning curve?" as I walked smack into a wall.

Lua is one of the most efficient and powerful of the scripting languages, but a lot of people want native pascal scripting. I can't say I blame them either. Familiarity to the programmer in charge is a very important thing.

Thanks for the link, Paul, as I have never seen that article before. I actually started cooking up my own expression engine (it was kind of like an s-expression parser minus the parentheses) awhile back. That will really help me in my understanding of scripting, etc.