infon

So does the good old Quake 2 rendering API. The game exported a bunch of functions to the renderer via refimport_t and the renderer in return provided functions via refexport_t. The only visible symbol in a rendering DLL is GetRefAPI_t: https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-2/blob/master/client/re... I remember being impressed by this approach, so I shamelessly copied it for my programming game: https://github.com/dividuum/infon/blob/master/renderer.h :)

Oh wow. Didn't expect anyone to remember. It was fun to program that one as the programming game for our local hacker conference and then seeing players compete. At some point later IIRC someone even wrote an somewhat advanced AI and created a small paper for it. The game should still be usable, but didn't get any love for a while now. Fun anecdote: infon itself is a followup to my own teen programming project written in Quick Basic (see https://github.com/dividuum/infon/wiki/History) and all the Lua embedding and experience I gained from it ultimately ended up being used in a followup project (info-beamer) which is now at the core of my own company and my full-time job. So write more games everyone!

There's an older FOSS game Infon[1] that has a similar gameplay, but scripted in Lua. [1]: https://github.com/dividuum/infon

Ah. Yeah applying resource limitations outside of memory usage is always a bit awkward. The only really supported way to my knowledge is to externally set a hook and trigger an error when called: https://github.com/lua/lua/blob/master/lua.c#L40-L59. I think this doesn't always work in tight loops though. I remember patching Lua over 10 years ago for a programming game. I essentially counted VM instructions and stopped executing when reaching the limit. It survived malicious players on a hacker conference back then ;-) The probably badly aged code is still available here: https://github.com/dividuum/infon/blob/c25eb749b17df3fd9b7a5...

For simple dialogs that don't have to be saved (see the other discussions), this seems like an easy way to quickly put any format of dialog system together without reinventing your own DSL to encode those dialogs as state machine(s). You can easily compose dialogs just by calling functions and thanks to Luas tail call optimization you could even jump between dialogs without the fear of running out of stack space. I'm not saying it's the best solution but it's pretty simple and probably easy to understand. I've used a similar approach way back in a networked multiplayer game where players could telnet into the game server and use text based menus to control the game. You can see the relevant Lua code here: https://github.com/dividuum/infon/blob/master/server.lua. I don't want to imagine how this code would look like without the use of coro

I wrote a Lua based programming game more than 10 years ago. You can look at it here: http://infon.dividuum.de/. Source code is also available on github: https://github.com/dividuum/infon. It was used during multiple local hacker conferences to keep the guests entertained. For that you would run the server somewhere, then run multiple viewers all over the place (and a big central screen) so everyone could follow the current game. Players would then connect to the server through telnet and upload their Lua code. Code could be updated while the game was running so people kept tweaking their code all the time. It was really fun seeing more than 20 player competing. The game should still work today and is basically feature complete.

You might have a look at two projects of mine related to gaming and lua: http://geolua.com/ - Allows you to develop mobile games for the browser using lua. http://geolua.com/adventure/all-widgets-demo-132 shows a basic example. http://github.com/dividuum/infon - A multiplayer game where players control ant-like creatures using lua. They fight, evolve and compete for food. https://github.com/dividuum/infon/tree/master/contrib/bots has some example code.