Galcon 2: Lua bot wars
Hey, it’s been a good week working on Galcon 2 
I started out this week by adding ships into the whole swarmy mess!
Next up I got the swarms “doing” something a bit more productive, and added planet ship count numbers. I also did a ton of analytics on idea parameters for the code to make swarming most efficient. It seems pretty fast now.
Then I cleaned things up a bit, added the user interface for selecting planets and deploying ships and added in a really simple bot so I could play against it!
Lastly, a lot of people were asking for the ability to help out with the single player game by doing mods, I build a large part of the modding system. Below is a movie of me running a Lua based mod with two bots fighting over the galaxy The mod has set the game to run at 16x speed so the outcome happens sooner.
I decided on Lua because out of my three main options (C, python, Lua), C is basically impossible to sandbox and I want people to be able to download and try out mods without too much concern. python is my favorite language, but embedding it is non-trivial. Lua won out, because it simple to embed, and doing basic sandboxing on it is pretty straightforward. This is the first time I’ve coded anything in Lua, and I found it was pretty straight-forward.
-Phil