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Unread 06-03-2011, 12:56 PM
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Garan Garan is online now
The Undying
Interface Author - Click to view interfaces
 
Join Date: Oct 2010
Posts: 340
I don't believe Turbine has completely abandoned Lua, but it is painfully obvious to the developer community that it is not a high priority. We, the plugin developers, have done our best to show Turbine that if they would just give us the basic functionality, we would provide immeasurable benefit for their product with a myriad of accessories and enhancements. Unfortunately, the only word of that which Turbine seems to have fixated on is "immeasurable" which they seem to believe means it can't be measured and thus must not be worth much. In reality it means it is of such vast value that it exceeds measure.

One indication of Turbine's lack of commitment is the failure to fix the event handling system. Notably, there is still no official means of protecting a plugin from having it's event handlers overwritten by another plugin as well as the significant bugs in the inventory event handlers. Both of those issues were brought to Turbine's attention over six months ago with no sign of a fix in sight.

Another indication of lack of commitment is the lack of responses to the Current API Issues & Discussion forum. We used to get responses from the devs verifying that issues were known and whether a fix was already developed or whether it was being looked into. The most recent dev response was on December 7th by Forsaken Archer regarding the non-functional TrajanPro25 font. Since then, we've had no responses to Current API Issues and in six month's time, they haven't fixed the font which was the last issue they acknowledged as broken.

Another indication of lack of commitment is that Turbine has not fixed even the simplest of issues like the missing enumeration values that have been reported, many of them as far back as last November. These are trivial fixes that simply require associating the correct numeric value with a Turbine provided constant. Since LUA allows us to see what constants are defined, it is woefully obvious that this has not been done.

Unfortunately, Turbine's priorities seem to be slightly out of wack as they continue to spend more in-house man hours building UI elements that the community finds undesirable both in appearance and functionality than implementing the system that would allow their community to build UI elements which the community finds desirable. Consider the fiasco with the Character panel - I do not know how many hundreds of man hours Turbine put into that hulking monstrosity that they foisted on the community, all to purportedly fix a UI element which was not actually broken to begin with. Many users voiced the opinion that Turbine only changed the panel so that they could add Store buttons. If that was the underlying cause then Turbine should have done the minimum amount of work needed to add the additional buttons and spent the rest of the man hours adding the hooks to the system to allow Lua developers to create their own Character panels. The community would have gotten far more options in UI display and Turbine would have gotten far better community feedback.

Given Turbine's track record with community based enhancements (XML feeds, skinning), I don't hold much hope for the Lua system in the long term. That said, as long as there is a glimmer of hope, I will continue to develope plugins, even if it's just to add some color to an otherwise bland chat window

Last edited by Garan : 06-03-2011 at 01:21 PM. Reason: typo
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