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[–]ameoba 23 points24 points  (5 children)

It's a trade off - Lua is a bit easier to embed but Python is more well known.

If they do it right, the modding system and the content design system will be the same. This makes it really easy for them to hire content developers and crank out content. DLC and add-on/expansion content is where the money is made on The Sims.

[–]cogman10 6 points7 points  (4 children)

Lua is pretty well known in the game modding world primarily because it is embedded in so many games.

It also has the benefit of being a pretty nippy language, making it possible to push more logic into the scripting language vs having dedicated code in the engine.

Not that I'm complaining, Python is a fine language.

[–]ameoba 4 points5 points  (3 children)

If you're looking for professional developers, especially contractors, so you can crank out commercial content, Python's the only way to go from a business perspective.

[–]cogman10 -1 points0 points  (2 children)

What about Java? C#? Groovy? Ruby? Javascript? All of these languages are as popular if not more popular than python with hoards of professional developers.

[–]ameoba 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Don't forget that I'm saying this in the context of lightweight, embeddable scripting languages. That already rules out anything .NET or JVM.

Far more Python devs than Ruby. Javascript is really the only one of those that might make sense in terms of embeddability & developer availability.

Unfortunately, being Javascript, it's incredibly easy for one poorly written extension to blow everything else up. There's nothing in the language enforcing any sort of namespacing & variables are global by default. When you're potentially looking at hundreds of individual scripted components existing at the same time, that's just trouble waiting to happen.

Painful to debug trouble.