Translations (JP to English)

[Recycler]

• Apparently, 1.0 servers were running on LUA scripts, and the biggest problems were instability and memory consumption.

I can't believe that. LUA? Seriously? It's way too much hyped, yes, but an experienced team of developers shouldn't even consider using it in an environment such as an MMO server.

• He's thinking about including a "no cut" [end of era + opening] version of the movie on the ARR CE

All my money for this.

[Griss]

I can't believe that. LUA? Seriously? It's way too much hyped, yes, but an experienced team of developers shouldn't even consider using it in an environment such as an MMO server.

I know it might be asking a lot but can some one do there best to explain what lua scripts are and why it was a bad idea to run them on the 1.0 servers? I'm not that familiar with the term.

[Soukyuu]

You are an Awesome Lalafell!!

Not as awesome as the Subligar King though xD

I know it might be asking a lot but can some one do there best to explain what lua scripts are and why it was a bad idea to run them on the 1.0 servers? I'm not that familiar with the term.

LUA is an interpreted script based programming language. Interpreted means the code is not compiled into machine code and executed on the CPU, but executed indirectly by an interpreter runtime. Obviously, this poses a certain disadvantage from the performance standpoint. I don't know how high the overhead is compared to a compiled language like C++ is, but looking at the amount of data a game server has to handle, I don't think LUA is well suited for MMOs. There should be no problems for normal games though and since Crystal Tools wasn't originally written with MMORPGs in mind, I guess they thought LUA was ok.

IMHO that just shows how bad the decision to use Crystal tool for FFXIV was. BTW, in case my summary gives off the impression of Yoshida-san lashing at the dev team with a whip, it's not really like that. From what I gathered, they're working together and if there are problems, they're discussing how they can be solved. Both the dev team and Yoshida-san are very happy about the positive feedback on alpha.

[KumaAkuma]

Not as awesome as the Subligar King though xD

LUA is an interpreted script based programming language. Interpreted means the code is not compiled into machine code and executed on the CPU, but executed indirectly by an interpreter runtime. Obviously, this poses a certain disadvantage from the performance standpoint. I don't know how high the overhead is compared to a compiled language like C++ is, but looking at the amount of data a game server has to handle, I don't think LUA is well suited for MMOs. There should be no problems for normal games though and since Crystal Tools wasn't originally written with MMORPGs in mind, I guess they thought LUA was ok.

IMHO that just shows how bad the decision to use Crystal tool for FFXIV was. BTW, in case my summary gives off the impression of Yoshida-san lashing at the dev team with a whip, it's not really like that. From what I gathered, they're working together and if there are problems, they're discussing how they can be solved. Both the dev team and Yoshida-san are very happy about the positive feedback on alpha.

I'm not sure if there is a relation but I'm guessing they're working with a virtual cloud for the servers? It has the benefit of being able to create virtual enviroments that can be moved around on the physical servers depending on high work load. It's very flexible, buuuuuuuuuuuuut in order to do that there is a wall separating the physical machine coding (cpu) and virtual enviroments (that handle the game). I'm guessing that's why the LUA is needed.

[Recycler]

I know it might be asking a lot but can some one do there best to explain what lua scripts are and why it was a bad idea to run them on the 1.0 servers? I'm not that familiar with the term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)

For the sake of this thread I won't go into detail, but the biggest issues with LUA are that it is dynamically typed, parsed / interpreted at runtime (if not compiled to some sort of bytecode) and it doesn't scale nearly as well as well written C or C++ code.

It is certainly fine for some tasks (especially GUI related) or even for small / medium scale server applications. I don't know for what parts they used LUA in the server, but I wouldn't write for example the AI in it. I happen to be the designer of a script interface for a game server and made some extensive research on this topic on my own / at university, so that's why I'm a bit shocked that SE developers chose LUA.