Hi Folks,
Nick asked me to comment on this briefly.
The two years isn't quite correct for just the Lua conversion part, but it did take a *lot* of time and thankfully, due to the size of Aardwolf, we had a lot of players to help us redo the mobprogs in Lua - so one player would convert an area using some guidelines we published and another group would test it. I probably did about 30% of the areas myself and it took about about 2-3 months altogether. At this point, no new value was added to the game, this was to get the minimum functionality that the progs already had into the new code base. Since the first conversion we've been going back to areas and making them work the way we always wanted them to, and the two years is probably dead on here - it started last Summer and I doubt we'll finish this year.
We really had no choice as we were unable to use existing mobprog code. I don't know how many mobprogs Smaug has or how complex they they are, but as awesome as Lua is for scripting, if what you're trying to do is just replicate the existing progs but in Lua, it probably isn't worth it.
If you want to use Lua for newer and more elaborate progs then I'd definitely recommend that. If you're running Smaug anyway then your time is probably better spent on new scripts that actually add something new to the game.
If your question was really "How do I make this work for mobprogs?" more than "How do I convert all mobprogs", I'll have to refer you back to Nick on that on as we're not using the same codebase or implementation of Lua.
Good luck with it! Converting to Lua is one of the best things we ever did, but converting the existing mobprogs would absolutely not have been worth if it hadn't been something we had no choice but to do.
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