Hey guys, today I got a little introduction into Lua. I know a little bit about what it can do, but I'm left wondering if I can script things like cutscenes.

For example, the cutscenes in my game will consist of game characters moving into position, doing animation sequences, etc. Also, there will be text dialogue, symbols (such as speech bubbles), and other things going on.

I'm wondering how applicable Lua would be to this kind of thing. The deepest I've gotten into Lua so far is writing very simple scripts and retrieving variable values from a C++ app. I was wondering if I could write scripts to closely control these kinds of actions within a game.

Thanks for any input!

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What most people don't understand about "enlightenment" is that it is not an end-goal; but where you find yourself just before taking a new "first step."

Lua can do anything that your host program can do as long as you export the appropriate functions.

All functions that can be exposed to Lua have the same signature in C which is a problem when trying to mix functions that will be called from Lua and ones that will be called in C, and I found it takes a while to get your head around it (could just be me!).

Also as I was using C++ I wanted to keep some concept of classes which isn't really included in Lua. There are a number of ways around this which are effective.

The approach I found the easiest in my latest project was to create a set of intermediate classes in C++ where the only public methods are specifically for exporting, and then use Lunar to export the classes as lua tables with methods.

Once you get it all working it really pays off being able to script in Lua and see changes without recompiling. As long as you expose enough functions to control what you need there aren't any limits in what you can do with it.

I have a modified version of Lunar which has had a lot of help from the lua mailing list, something i'd recommend signing up to. I found documentation a bit sparse on a number of things I was trying to do but got comprehensive help within 24 hours from the mailing list.

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www.littlemonkey.co.nz

Lua can do as much as you let it really. While I can't offer advice on linking it to your C code I will say that it's fine for cutscenes and the like.

After all - the minigames in two of the recent games i've worked on had all of their logic and level code written in lua.

Though it does have it's peculiarities -might just be our interpreter but it was possible for part of the script to die and the rest of it keep running, for a while at least, before crashing somewhere unrelated to the broken code.