On March 10th 2010 a group of the game industry's top thought leaders gathered to discuss Lua's Past Present and Future. See below for presentations and speaker bios.
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Roberto Ierusalimschy - Professor, University of PUC Rio
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Roberto Ierusalimschy is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at PUC-Rio (the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro), where he works with programming-language design and implementation. He is the leading architect of the Lua programming language and the author of "Programming in Lua" (now in its second edition and translated to Chinese, Korean, German, and Japanese). Roberto has a M.Sc. Degree (1986) and a D.Sc. Degree (1990) in Computer Science, both from PUC-Rio. As a professor, Roberto was the advisor of several students that later became influential members of the Lua community. Lately he has been developing LPEG, a novel pattern-matching package for Lua.
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Bret Mogilefsky - Senior Manager, SCEA
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Bret was a developer at LucasArts from 1988 to 1999 where he worked on adventure games including the Monkey Island series and Grim Fandango, on which he was the lead programmer and a co-designer. Lua was the key factor enabling a brilliant team to deliver Grim Fandango, which is acknowledged as the first use of Lua in the game industry. Bret's report on his usage of Lua at GDC99 was the start of a mini-stampede. Since 1999, Bret has helped deliver great titles on PlayStation platforms as a manager in the Developer Support group at Sony Computer Entertainment America.
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Steve Collins - CTO/Founder Kore Virtual Machines.
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Steve Collins is CTO and Co-founder of Kore Virtual Machines, a start-up looking to develop new tools for game production. Previously he was the co-founder and CTO of Havok and led the technical development and strategy of the company until late 2005. Steve also works with Trinity College Dublin (TCD) as a senior lecturer, teaches GPU programming and has a number of funded research projects in physically based animation and global illumination. In 2007 he founded TCD's new MSc program in computer game technology. Previously he founded the TCD computer graphics group. Earlier still he worked on scientific visualization software for Hitachi Super Computers and developed Commodore 64 games.
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Paul Du Bois - Senior Programmer, Double Fine
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Paul has been in the game industry since 1998; his most recent shipped project was the PC, Xbox and PS2 action-adventure game PSYCHONAUTS, where he was responsible for the simulation and main character gameplay, as well as the care, feeding, and mutation of the Lua runtime. He is currently a senior programmer at Double Fine Productions, focusing on platform-specific engine details.
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RJ Mical - Sony Computer Entertainment America
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RJ's professional career started with arcade development at Williams Electronics and led to his role in the creation of the Amiga Computer. He was co-inventor of the Atari Lynx handheld game system and the 3DO entertainment console, and he was responsible for software engineering at Red Jade for Ericsson. Most recently RJ has been Chief Architect for the Fathammer mobile game engine, VP of Technology for GlobalVR, and currently he is working on top-secret technology for Sony. He developed 15 video games, has 10 patents, designed 4 hardware platforms, architected 3 operating systems, has too many hobbies and is one swell guy!
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Allan Murphy - Senior Software Development Engineer, Microsoft/Xbox
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Allan has worked in the game industry for over 16 years and on consoles since the early 90s. He has shipped many titles and worked on a variety of engine technologies; he is currently a proactive engineer in Microsoft's XNA Developer Connection (XDC) group, where he helps developers create technically strong games across a range of Microsoft platforms.
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Jonathan Shaw, Lead Gameplay Programmer, Lionhead
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Jonathan has been working at Lionhead and on the Fable franchise as a gameplay programmer for over nine years. On Fable II he was heavily involved with setting up the initial game architecture and was responsible for integrating Lua into the game and setting up AI and quest systems, as well as implementing the game save/load system. He is currently the lead gameplay programmer for Fable III.
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Don Veca - Audio Director, Sledgehammer Games/Activision
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Don Veca recently moved to Activision after spending 18 years at Electronic Arts. He started working in game audio because he had a background in both audio and computer science. Don started as an audio tools programmer, but soon cross-faded into music and sound design. His first game as an Audio Director was Road Rash III (Sega Genesis), and his most recent game was Dead Space. But all this is really just a hobby... he's actually a Jazz bass player, just in case the game audio thing doesn't pan out.
Sample files are here
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