Games Convention 2005

I was planning to write some other blog entries about recent developments as well, but I had not much time and a lot of troubles with one of my tooth (root canal resection was done 2 weeks ago and there is still a lot of pain going on, I'm only at 25% health, I guess I need some health packs).

However, one thing I worked on last weekend was Lua2IL, the homepage from the Lua .NET Guys (Roberto Ierusalimschy (founder of Lua), Renato Cequeira and Fabio Mascarenhas) was updated a couple of weeks back and you can download the Lua2IL Binary and Sourcecode files there and play around with them. I think this is very powerful stuff, you can now compile Lua bytecode directly to .NET IL code (and save it for example in a .dll assembly file) and use that directly from your .NET code. For example: I use currently a similar approach as LuaInterface, where all the Lua code is compiled natively and then executed with help of the Lua50.dll with some interop calls from .NET to call methods and set values. This is pretty nice for some smaller problems (some data stored, maybe some AI code), but for my fancy Effect-Particle-etc. System I wrote a while back for Lost Squadron it was quite a lot of work to syncronize the Lua code with the .NET code and everytime I changed some tiny bit of any table or method, I had to adjust some .NET caller code as well.

With Lua bytecode compiled directly to .NET IL and use it as a simple .NET assembly this problems are not longer an issue, because you can call methods directly now and use your .NET code in Lua much easier. Currently I've done just some simple tests and ported some old code to .NET 2.0, but the performance is also very nice (read about it here: PDF paper about Lua2IL from Fabio Mascarenhas, Roberto Ierusalimschy). When I have more time in the next couple of weeks I will hopefully implement more stuff in Lua and play with on the fly generated code a bit more.

Links of Lua2IL project:

• Lua .NET: Integrating Lua with the CLI Homepage with the LuaInterface and Lua2IL projects
• The website is currently down for some reason, I guess it will be back up shortly, if not just use the google cache of the site. Or the google cache of the Lua2IL site here.