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.

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.

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 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".

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 fear they are about to get a harsh lesson in what happens when the mob you are leading turns against you.

Between this and a few more incidents, I no longer buy anything on Amazon where getting a valid OEM brand version of an item is important to me.

The good news is that for the few years I was pretty much Amazon exclusive the rest of the internet got really good at ecommerce too so it's a much better ordering from other companies online now.

After a few years of using Amazon pretty much exclusively for everything then going back to other sites for branded items, I have been pleasantly surprised how much better "all the other" online stores have gotten at fast free shipping and reliable service.

In anything technology related, this has already been true for a couple of decades now. I can buy a phone, TV, computer, tablet etc today, or I can wait a year and get much more for the same amount of money.

People still buy all of those things because, as others have posted, you reach a point where you just have to or want to upgrade because the alternative is you spend years on old technology endlessly waiting for "just the right time to buy".