OmarShehata wrote:I just found this and I want to say, this project is brilliant!! Programming with Lua was beginning to seem frustrating, and then this graceful language lands into existence!
Thanks! I was also tired of Lua syntax and now that Killa is usable I'm not using Lua anymore, but Killa rest in the shoulders of Lua, so all the kudos for the Lua authors because all the hard work was already done
OmarShehata wrote:
1) Is Killa stable enough to be used for a commercial game? Even if there's a bug or two, I think the massive headaches Killa would prevent with its stricter nature would far outweigh using just Lua
I would say it's usable in its current 0.1 version, remember that Killa is based on Lua 5.2 and Lua by itself it's pretty stable, if there are bugs in there they are likely my bugs :p, in all this time I found 2 rare bugs in Killa, they are still not fixed but they block compilation and are easy to workaround so I guess nothing serious, I have made a simple tetris game and a simple fractal viewer, they work as expected, if there are other bugs they are likely to be in the engine integration, I didn't touched the physics module, and coroutines are also not tested. I would love to have more tests done by others.
I was kind of worried about closures because I did some changes there but it seems to me that closures are working fine, and what a beautiful thing they are with a JavaScript like syntax:
https://github.com/ex/Killa/blob/3d16bd ... 9beers.kia
Just now I ported the fractal viewer to cocos2d-x, it's in github already and I'm pleased to announce that Killa is now working fine in mobiles thanks to its integration with cocos2d-x, here is an screenshot on iOS, but this is also tested on android devices:
So in resume: yes Killa would help you with the problem of global variables created silently, but:
OmarShehata wrote:
2) If I'm on Windows, do I need the MVSC project files to actually code in Killa or just to modify the source? I managed to edit and compile the tetris demo using Sublime, but:
3)Why is there a .lua and a .kia version of every file in the tetris demo? Editing the "game.kia" seems to affect the game as it should, but the game.lua isn't updated. (I commented out the code that drops the blocks in the .kia, but it was still there in the game.lua and it seemed the .kia was the one being executed) but then I tried to delete the .lua files but the project wouldn't work then. How does this work exactly?
Love-Killa has only being compiled in Windows, there are no MacOSX/Linux binaries, last time I tried to compile Love for mac I failed miserably due to a lot of missing dependencies, it was not simple and I didn't have enough time, also I don't have a mac at hand. You'll need to be proficient with compiling Love and making the changes for mac and linux if it's not ready by me, it's just a matter of updating the projects but is not trivial if you don't have the target system at hand and have some familiarity with the building tools, so I'll say that you'll need to be able to do this if you want to use Killa in a commercial product and fix any possible bugs still not found in these operative systems.
Right now I'd only recommend Killa to the brave souls that can hack his way reading the source code, it's not friendly for newcomers, if you have only used Lua inside Love and don't have touched the engine I don't recommend you using Killa unless you are only targeting Windows and there are no blocker bugs that need to be fixed, sure I'll get to compile Love-killa for mac/linux in the future and I'll check for any bug report but I can not make promises about schedules.
OmarShehata wrote:
4)How do I assemble the love-killa.exe as in the tetris demo? Is it just the same like a normal love file? Like, what do I need to create a new project with Killa?
Please use the latest version on bitbucket, the HEAD is the stable version, if you have visual 2008 compile the exe, I'm not sure if the last exe is compiled, if it is not I'll upload a new version, but this is for windows only, you'll need to distribute the Love-killa exe with the folder of your game with the *.kia files, there is no need to add a batch or modify shortcuts because Love-killa looks for the folder "game", this way you only need to drop the folder to the user and start the program, Love-killa must run the same as Love 0.8.0, I didn't changed or modified the rendering support, just the scripting support.
thanks for being interested on Killa!
Cheers