Should I be using Lua for game logic on mobile devices?
- by Rob Ashton
As above really,
I'm writing an android based game in my spare time (android because it's free and I've no real aspirations to do anything commercial).
The game logic comes from a very typical component based model whereby entities exist and have components attached to them and messages are sent to and fro in order to make things happen.
Obviously the layer for actually performing that is thin, and if I were to write an iPhone version of this app, I'd have to re-write the renderer and core driver (of this component based system) in Objective C.
The entities are just flat files determining the names of the components to be added, and the components themselves are simple, single-purpose objects containing the logic for the entity.
Now, if I write all the logic for those components in Java, then I'd have to re-write them on Objective C if I decided to do an iPhone port. As the bulk of the application logic is contained within these components, they would, in an ideal world, be written in some platform-agnostic language/script/DSL which could then just be loaded into the app on whatever platform.
I've been led to believe however that this is not an ideal world though, and that Lua performance etc on mobile devices still isn't up to scratch, that the overhead is too much and that I'd run into troubles later if I went down that route?
Is this actually the case? Obviously this is just a hypothetical question, I'm happy writing them all in Java as it's simple and easy get things off the ground, but say I actually enjoy making this game (unlikely, given how much I'm currently disliking having to deal with all those different mobile devices) and I wanted to make a commercially viable game - would I use Lua or would I just take the hit when it came to porting and just re-write all the code?
