LUA - A Linguagem de Programação
Autor: Jorge Faria | Publicado: 2013-12-09T11:22:00-08:00






&nbsp;http://www.lua.org/portugues.html

The Economy
The difference in the percentage of people using game engines versus 
those who want to is certainly interesting. Could the high level of use 
have something to do with the economy, or with the increasing cost of 
development? I asked the producers whether they’ve found themselves with
 tighter budget constraints due to the economy. 78.6% responded yes. But
 in the comments many people pointed to tighter control over their 
budgets, as opposed to diminishing budgets.
Following up, what has been the impact of these rising development costs
 and a dwindling economy? What concerns have increased most for 
developers in recent years? The five most popular responses were:

Increasing development cycle length, increasing headcount, trying to 
create game designs that stand out from the pack… these are fairly 
consistent game developer challenges. But looking for rapid prototyping 
and rapid iteration tools? Here we find interesting new news. Rapid 
prototyping enables a developer to more quickly draft and test game 
concepts for fun in the early stages of a project, and also use the 
prototype to acquire funding. Rapid iteration gives one the ability to 
quickly try out many ideas during development, improving the game 
through frequent experimentation and fine-tuning.
If rapid prototyping and rapid iteration are weighing heavily on 
people’s minds, what are they using now? And how many studios have live 
preview on the target platform in their current content pipelines?
I asked, “what are you using for rapid prototyping?”

Several people noted that are using their previous engine versions to 
create prototypes for the next game. But what do new studios use? It 
looks like they probably create one-off C++ applications, sketch things 
out on paper, or use Flash or Lua. I had suspected that more developers 
would be using C#/XNA due to the ease of quickly knocking out quick test
 applications with it, but only 5% of the responders said they are using
 this for prototype development. (However, 76% of developers are using 
C#/XNA for tool building.)
If rapid iteration is also a growing concern in game development, how 
many developers currently have the ability to do live preview on the 
target platform for their content developers (artists and designers)? 
According to the results, 62.5% currently have this capability. Several 
responders noted that they preview on a PC version of their engine and 
that this is good enough for most work. Certainly using the actual 
target platform would be even more valuable though!
One useful tool for rapid iteration during development is the use of 
interpreted scripts; if the designer can write in a script language and 
immediately execute it on the target platform (as opposed to a long 
recompile or download), the iteration cycle can become quite fast, 
enabling many experiments and much more fine-tuning of gameplay ideas. 
But what script languages are most people using? (This query supported 
multiple replies.)


It seems that Lua is the hands-down favorite for scripting languages at 
the moment, although one developer wryly noted: “Lua is a failure – 
decided before I joined.” Lua is a solution that can work, but people 
tend to have a love/hate relationship with it. Using Lua on 
performance-constrained platforms can definitely be a challenge if you 
don’t understand the ins and outs of Lua’s memory usage.

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http://www.satori.org/2009/03/the-engine-survey-general-results/