this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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... Ok, that is legitimately impressive, from a technical standpoint.
Lua is a high level, not exactly very 'fast', very performant language. It is designed to be very, very human readable, and coding noob friendly.
Getting a 3D physics engine to work ... in lua... is not something I would have thought possible.
Usually you need to use a much lower level language to ... actually do that.
EDIT:
A few other commenters have now pointed out that this is actually using LuaJIT... which passes Lua code to a C compiler, quickly translates and then compiles in C, and then runs in C.
So, that makes much more sense, its functionally running in C, a lower level, compiled code language.
Still impressive nonetheless!
Imma be the guy and drop an ackshually
Project Zombie and GMod both use Lua scripts. GMod is also one of the best physics sandboxes imo, and has like the most mods on the workshop ever.
The physics in GMod isn't implemented in Lua though. It was already part of the Source engine.
Unless GMod isn't referring to Garry's Mod.
Yeah, was gonna say this.
If you actually do use Lua to significantly alter the actual physics, shit gets fuckywucky really, really fast... its quite inefficient and laggy.
I know, because I've tried to implement custom physics manipulations in Gmod via Lua... the netgraph, and server side lag, becomes absolutely absymal, really fast, if you're trying to use it for more than just a few objects/interactions at a time.
Like the uh... Armored Combat Framework?
That uses Lua to allow you to construct your own custom tanks and what not?
That tries to do things like penetration/ricochet calls on physics and collision hulls... through Lua?
Astoundingly inefficient and laggy in pretty much any situation with more than 3 or 4 vehicles operating and engaging each other at the same time... especially so if they are using high rate of fire autocannons or machine guns.
You have to have an unusually powerful server to be able to handle more than that, and its still gonna chug as you scale up conflict sizes.
As I remember, most ACF servers had/have a bunch of rules about giving warnings before you dupe spawn or dupe save a vehicle design, have maximum part complexity limits, have designated build and designated battle times, or just seperate servers for each... because using Lua to handle so much physics stuff is so often likely to cause server stalls and crashes.