Need Some Advice About Lua/luabind Versions

[Yannick]

Situation sketch:
I developed a minimalistic 2D engine with SDL/Lua5.1 on Ubuntu Hardy (with backports on)
The engine does nothing fancy, just SDL, Lua and some boost/stl collections.
I decided LuaBind is the best option to clean up my Lua API
The ubuntu luabind package is version 0.7.0 wich is only compatible with Lua 5.0 and an older version of boost.
I want my games to run on Ubuntu and the pandora.


My questions to a more experienced game developer:

Should I go thru the trouble of custom building my libs?
Should I just stick with ubuntu/debian *-dev packages and use older lib versions?

 

[MarcelP102]

huh that's weird, im getting an email notefication but I din't subcripe to this topic

 

[the_darkside_986]

Meh, I've never used automated binding tools. I just write all of my bindings to SDL manually so that I have full control over everything and make sure it works with the latest Lua, of which I use my own downloaded copy because the Debian package is STILL outdated by a few versions even in Ibex. It gets tedious, sure, but I write macros here and there to make things a little more readable and maintainable.

And I'm not sure how automated bindings would properly handle garbage collection. In my "Pandora lua runtime" I'm working on, I bind SDL_FreeSurface as well as implement automatic garbage collection for the bound userdata, and write the functions in such a way that it knows not to double-free. So the Lua user can either manually free their images or let the GC handle it.

Shamefully I must admit to using the default Ubuntu SDL development libraries but that will change ASAP whenever I get my Pandora and get around to setting up a real Pandora dev environment. (I know about OpenEmbedded and all that but I am waiting for a nice automated toolchain script like the PSP homebrew scene has).

 

[raytaller]

Have a look at tolua (better : tolua++). This is my key discovery of year 2007.
At first, i thought that running a command each time you change your headers is painful but... really, just give a try.

Just add a few // tolua_bein // tolua_end to your game classes headers, and tolua++ will create a huge .cpp to link with, including all the bindings.
Easy to plug, and you'll not be stuck with the exponential compilation time imposed by Luabind.

My 2 cents

 

[sweetlilmre]

Have a look at tolua (better : tolua++). This is my key discovery of year 2007.
At first, i thought that running a command each time you change your headers is painful but... really, just give a try.

Just add a few // tolua_bein // tolua_end to your game classes headers, and tolua++ will create a huge .cpp to link with, including all the bindings.
Easy to plug, and you'll not be stuck with the exponential compilation time imposed by Luabind.

My 2 cents

+1

-(e)

 

[Yannick]

There seem to be alot of *old* libs in ibex, considering this is not a LTS release :s

I really hope there will be a shellscript like the PSP toolchain, that's awesome. But i sold my PSP for pandora money

I am going to take a look at tolua++ as soon as my fresh ibex install is *development ready* no need to hurry