Title.

Yep. It's deprecated.

What was the reason for it? Crytek made amazing games with LUA scripting, did you guys found some fundamental flaw with it?

From what I remember it is being replaced by Schematyc / C#. No clue if there is a flaw but I guess the majority of the people like visual scripting (looking at the amount of blueprint users in ue4).

UE4 forces to use blueprints in some areas. Never think we enjoy it. Visual scripting is a mess to maintain. The only ones who may like it are non-programmers. For programmers typing is faster than wiring two nodes together.

Of course, I prefer c++ over blueprints anytime. I was simply referring to designers who would like to prototype mechanics or game events quickly without diving into code.

What was the reason for it? Crytek made amazing games with LUA scripting, did you guys found some fundamental flaw with it?

The reasoning behind it is that fundamentally we changed the way we worked internally and had to adapt. We no longer used Lua in production and the industry itself has been embracing more modular entities (components) and also vsual scripting as quoted above. Lua for years has been barely limping along in usage within the community and if you had to truly want to find documentation on the older systems you had to Google Blue Mars to see more Lua setups outside the GameSDK.

I see moving past Lua as being for the best.

Hi collin,
I think you know that for years I have been developing a simulator (flight simulator etc) using Lua. So you can probably guess how I feel about this!

Flow graph/visual scripting has its place, for things like setting up the AI behaviour in a map. But what it is *not* good at is creating complex entities. Over the years people have created monster flow graphs. They quickly get to a point where it is almost impossible to develop and maintain them. They would have been wiser to have spent a couple of hours learning Lua.
Lua in Cry Engine is a fantastic development environment. No need for re-compiling C++ code and reloading Sandbox: with Lua, simply edit and save the file, click Reload Script and instantly test the changes in game mode. This makes debugging about a million times easier!

My simulator is actually several simulators rolled into one: flight simulator, train simulator, ship simulator, car and spaceflight simulator. I do plan to make a car racing option. The simulator is sophisticated and has features that quite possibly no commercial simulator had e.g. the ability of player and AI aircraft/vehicles to operate on real, moving aircraft carriers.

Some years ago I developed an autogen system. It dynamically creates thousands of scenery objects (e.g. houses and trees) and places them on the terrain around the player. This makes it easy to populate maps hundreds of kilometers across with dense autogen scenery (which also includes rail tracks and roads with AI trains and cars).
The screenshot shows a brand new feature in the very earliest stages of development: terrain autogen. The code is moving and placing brush terrain grids, so that the player is always surrounded with terrain. In the screenshot the Harrier has flown about 200km, but the CamPos shows that the Harrier is still close to the origin. The player vehicle only moves a few kilometers: it's the outside world that moves. This also solves the vibration problems caused by the game engine's low floating point precision. When fully developed this feature could make, say, a flight from London to New York quite possible (though probably with a jump function to reduce the time need to cross the Atlantic! )

The point of all this is very simple: everything is done entirely with Lua. As I said, it is a superb development environment. It can access the C++ libraries via the script binds, and so is very powerful. I was always amazed at how overlooked it was. So, as a result, CEV will not have a flight simulator and the other things. But CE3 will. I will continue to develop the simulator on CE3, which is pretty well perfect.
But I think it's a sad day for Cry Engine.

Best regards,
Chris

@Lavizh
The file sizes limit is still too small. I had to reduce the screenshot, its original size of 555 kb was too large.
I would really appreciate it if you could fix this annoying problem. Could we make it a case of third time lucky!
Chris

@Chris

Just to get back to you on this briefly. With us still fully supporting Lua with GameSDK and having written in that legacy support specifically. What is stopping you from going to CE V regarding Lua given we have made the effort to carry on the support from 3 to V for this very aspect? At this point we have bridged Lua to CE V for over 17 months since the release of CE V.

I personally think you could port and still use the GameSDK but I will say I have enjoyed seeing your progress over the years and wish you the best in your dev.

best

Collin

Hi Collin,
This sounds *very* interesting!
I thought that Lua was now deprecated in CEV, end of story. I didn't know about continued support for Lua in CEV GameSDK (I always use GameSDK anyway).
So, I may well install the latest CEV and GameSDK, and check it for Lua functionality. If it all works, as seems to be the case, then it is a game changer - literally!

Many thanks for your help.
Chris