I was just wondering if it was worth it to learn LUA scripting for the triple A gaming scene. I know C++ and C# and I was looking into learning something new.
Is it worth it to learn LUA scripting for the AAA game industry?
Sure. The last big company that I worked for wrote all their gameplay code in Lua, and the Stingray engine (formerly bitsquid) is based around the same philosophy.
Even if you don't end up using it professionally, it's always worthwhile to gain experience with as many different languages as you can (and practice learning new ones for when you need it later).
Even smaller games like WoW use LUA (->UI) ;-). Considering, that LUA is a very simple(!), robust, fast, powerful scripting language, I would even encourage to learn it without some big AAA title backing it up.
"Is it worth it" is personal. Is it worth it to you?
It is useful to some people. Some people use it in their jobs. Some people never use it.
It could be valuable to you. Are there other, more valuable things you can do with your time? Is it something that interests you? Is it something you feel you want to study? Is there something else you would prefer to study?
Learning Lua is not wrong or bad, nor is it particularly right or good. It is something to learn if you want to, or not if you don't want to.
It is useful to some people. Some people use it in their jobs. Some people never use it.
It could be valuable to you. Are there other, more valuable things you can do with your time? Is it something that interests you? Is it something you feel you want to study? Is there something else you would prefer to study?
Learning Lua is not wrong or bad, nor is it particularly right or good. It is something to learn if you want to, or not if you don't want to.
Stingray use lua and i think Lumberyard/cryengine also use it in some way. I used Lua in bitsquid/stingray and it's mostly about learning the structure of the lua code and the interface to the engine. Lua itself is easy to learn and it does not take much time to understand the basics.
Learning something new is never not worth it. Even if your studio uses a different programming language it is still useful to learn LUA as it gives you a different perspective on things.
While I agree learning something new is good, it's much easier to learn something you find interesting. If there is some other language you'd rather learn, or something else that's currently got you curious, just go do that instead.
The more languages the know the better, even better when you spread your knowledge across a number of different paradigms.
The reason for this is that most languages have some feature that differentiates them or they force you to work and think in a different way. This gives you a far wider grab bag of techniques and solutions when working on things, no matter the language.
I made the jump into functional languages a couple of years back. I mostly work in OO languages but find that a lot of the functional techniques have saved me or made my OO code more streamlined and easier to reuse etc.
Knowledge is a good thing :)
Lua is trivial to learn if you already program. If you're interested in it then just do it.
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