I decided early on with the game idea that I wanted to target DX11 hardware and multi-core CPUs only; mostly because I was under no illusion about a fast release time and partly because I decided I wanted things to look nice thus a DX11 card was pretty much a must.
This then lead to my deciding to build the game, more or less from the ground up, by myself. This was never going to be an 'engine' thing, more a set of code required to make the game I could see in my head happen. After some playing around I decided that, in order to support scaling across cores, I would use Intel's TBB as my 'core' around which the game would be built. This is easy enough to do it's just a matter of getting into the 'task based' mindset and being mindful of your data flow in order to get the most from the cpu.
However, while large chunks of the game would be done in C++ (because as much as I like C# sometimes I just love to hack on C++) various pieces of logic could be 'soft coded' in script form with no problem. Well, apart from one; concurrency.
My scripting language of choice has been, for some time now, Lua; I like the lightness of the language, the speed of the language and the synxtax of the language. While I can work with Python and others something about Lua drags me back. The problem is Lua has some thread safety issues even when executing different contexts on different threads.
The first problem I came across was the function recursion count; basically Lua only lets you go so deep, but as the inc/dec on this wasn't protected.. well.. bang!
I "fixed" that by shifting the count out to the thread state from the global state, all seemed good... right up until the first GC cycle at which point... bang!
At this point I admitted defeat on the Lua front and took a look at some other languages however between them I couldn't find something I liked. GameMonkey script came close however no dice.
About that point I went mad and decided 'sod this, I'll do it myself...' and with that I've decided to build my own LLVM backend'd system using Lua-like syntax and features.
The aim is, once up and running, to extend it with a few game specific features (and probably a few stolen from other languages such as GMScript and Squirrel) and generally make it awesome.
No time scale is planned on this front, mostly because work is a bit mad right now but this is where I've ended up after a coming up with a game idea..
