[Harakiri23]

Originally Posted by Zaela_S

This thread has kind of died down and maybe there wasn't that much interest in the first place, but: I just re-read this and want to take a moment to make a case against using any auto-generated bindings/wrappers if a Lua quest scripting system does become a thing.

You want to simplify things but still dont want to use a wrapper ? I skimmed over your code - and the problem is - the same as with the perl system - only 1% will understand it and maintaining and extending will be done by copy&paste of existing code without really understanding it (e.g. people currently just paste code in the embperl classes for new functions - but thats not how its done, there should be a clean header file to perl exported functions and then the perlxs/convert is called which generates all the func bodies).

Whats worse - lua is stack based - thats a whole new level of understanding for most people. For perl, you were unable to expose complex objects (func args) to the quest system - now with direct lua calls you have the same issue - every complex object has to be manually coded - where in bindings its done in one line.

Look how WoW emus, EQ2, Ryzoom and other implemented their event system - and compare all the bad things and improve upon this - (BTW - they all use bindings). A quick example how a binding could look like for getters or setters

	  .def("GetName", &NPC::GetName)	  
	  .def("GetCleanName", &NPC::GetCleanName)	  
	  .def("GetID", &NPC::GetID)	  
	  .def("GetRace", &NPC::GetRace)	  
	  .def("GetClass", &NPC::GetClass)	  
          .def("Say", &NPC::Say)

Thats everything you need - number of args, arg types, etc all automatically handled - everybody understands this. No need for

static int Lua_GetName(lua_State* L) {
	int num_args = lua_gettop(L);
	if (!num_args || !lua_isuserdata(L,1))
		return 0;

	Mob* check = *(Mob**)lua_touserdata(L,1);
	if (check) {
		if (check->IsNPC()) {
			if (num_args > 1 && lua_isboolean(L,2) && lua_toboolean(L,2)) {
				lua_pushstring(L,check->GetName());
			}
			else {
				lua_pushstring(L,check->GetCleanName());
			}
		}
		else {
			lua_pushstring(L,check->GetName());
		}
		return 1;
	}
	return 0;
}

You still need at least one or two who understand lower level lua api - e.g. ever thought about garbage collection ? If you dont have the right approach here your embedded lua will be very slow and the memory will grow very quickly.

More things you need to take care of : script scoping - want to make sure that nobody can overwrite a var of another npc ? or do you want that ?

How can entities interact with each other directly?