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it is not always about whether you can at all. Sometimes it's about power budget- That is, battery drain, etc. Run your lua engine and you have less budget for

it is not always about whether you can at all. Sometimes it's about power budget- That is, battery drain, etc. Run your lua engine and you have less budget for particle effects. Run all the things and your game drains the battery in 10 minutes. It's perfectly legitimate to not care. Writing a from scratch bytecode vm is a fairly extreme last resort solution. But on the other hand, the bytecode VM, appropriately scoped, could end up being easier than embedding lua. That is, if what you're doing is only barely more than loading and using data- not even quite crossing the boundary into turing completeness.

eropple 13y ago
The power delta between AngelScript or Lua and your own interpreter is gonna be pretty small, though. It's a cost you pay once (in a modern implementation) to interpret into...a bytecode VM. And you totally might be a wizard beyond my ken here, but I strongly doubt it'll be easier to implement a bytecode VM of your own than calling, like, five functions. =) I'm not denying that there are cases where such a thing is valuable, don't get me wrong, but don't reinvent what you don't have to. And probably should not be the first thing you're reaching for in your toolbox. Or second.
- TheZenPsycho 13y ago
  You're probably right and it's totally irrelevant in this day and age with cheap memory and cpu power. I can't help but remember fondly on the idea of the bytecodeVM that "Out of this World" used to draw vector graphics, and think "That. is. neat". or the power and flexibility the SCUMM vm afforded story writers. It's fetishistic and unrealistic I suppose, to think it would be cool to do some amazing game on some extremely primitive slow low power cheap machine that anyone could buy for like $10. The whole fantasy usually ends when you realise that the cost of displays is well beyond the cost any actual computer hardware you may consider.

eropple 13y ago

The power delta between AngelScript or Lua and your own interpreter is gonna be pretty small, though. It's a cost you pay once (in a modern implementation) to interpret into...a bytecode VM. And you totally might be a wizard beyond my ken here, but I strongly doubt it'll be easier to implement a bytecode VM of your own than calling, like, five functions. =) I'm not denying that there are cases where such a thing is valuable, don't get me wrong, but don't reinvent what you don't have to. And probably should not be the first thing you're reaching for in your toolbox. Or second.

TheZenPsycho 13y ago
You're probably right and it's totally irrelevant in this day and age with cheap memory and cpu power. I can't help but remember fondly on the idea of the bytecodeVM that "Out of this World" used to draw vector graphics, and think "That. is. neat". or the power and flexibility the SCUMM vm afforded story writers. It's fetishistic and unrealistic I suppose, to think it would be cool to do some amazing game on some extremely primitive slow low power cheap machine that anyone could buy for like $10. The whole fantasy usually ends when you realise that the cost of displays is well beyond the cost any actual computer hardware you may consider.