Small world! That's awesome that Aardwolf was part of what helped you get into programming. I hear you on areas, I'm far better at the core game engine than I am coming up with good ideas and story lines for areas and quests.
I don't want to cross the line into "advertising" but this thread is probably mostly done anyway so, we have a Discord now if you want to drop by and say hi without connecting to the game itself.
This article really hit home for me. On Aardwolf MUD we replaced "mobprog" scripting with Lua based progs back in 2007/2008 and it has been the single best change we ever made in 25+ years of our game.
The experiences that area builders have been able to create goes way beyond anything we envisioned - with 40 or so LUA functions integrated into the C codebase and basic access to rooms/objects/players and NPCs from Lua they have been able to make entire sub games.
I couldn't imagine trying to build a full application with Lua, but for this use case, it is perfect.
On Aardwolf (a MUD), Lua is our main scripting language and it is amazing what people who come into the game not knowing how to program have been able to create with it, way beyond anything we envisioned.
It is lightweight when not in use and integrates perfectly with the core C codebase.
If I had to pick one single thing that has had the most impact in our game over the 25 years we have been around it would be moving all of our in-game scripting to Lua.
I'm a paying member of Medium although, due to time constraints, I only really read the articles in the Weekly Digest emails at the weekend.
I have noticed a lot of these articles that just make no sense at all starting to appear in my weekly email to the point that I probably won't renew next year if it stays this way, so it isn't just "nobody reading them".
Reminds me of a situation I encountered with Salesforce code many years ago. Salesforce had a requirement that their test platform had to cover some percentage of the lines of code in the Sandbox before you could deploy something to production.
Our Salesforce implementation consultants had put 500 lines of 'x = 1' into a piece of code to force it to deploy -- and these were people at a top consulting company with a very lucrative hourly rate.
No idea if SFDC still works this way or if this would fly today, this was back in the days when you had to use Flex to integrate anything with the UI.
I don't want to cross the line into "advertising" but this thread is probably mostly done anyway so, we have a Discord now if you want to drop by and say hi without connecting to the game itself.