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I know what you mean lol, but Lua is very noob friendly... it goes fairly far out of its way to make many common functions and data types as compatible with each other as possible... so thats another way it is generally more slow, but also more forgiving, won't just totally error out and be frustrating to a beginner coder.

I haven't benchmarked anything in a while, so it is possible Lua is more performant now than it once was... but in my (out of date) experience, python is faster than Lua, and nearly every language that is actually compiled is... one or two or three orders of magnitude faster.

Though it is also worth mentioning that Lua is fairly simple to plug in to some kind of database language, which can result in reasonably good performance in situations involving say... dynamically spawning or unspawning tons of inventory style minor items, or containers with them.

Lua has been fast enough to handle a simple 2D physics engine... but this is the first time I am hearing of it handling 3D.

Lua can be very fast using LuaJIT or similar

This appears to use OpenMW, not MWSE

Now, that is a very relevant detail!

I did not know LuaJIT was even a thing.

Still probably not as performant as ... C++ or Rust or something, that is totally precompiled... but that would explain how this is even possible, a 3D Lua based physics engine.

Yeah, looks like LuaJIT passes a bunch of the Lua code into C, just good ole C, and then dynamically compiles it, then runs the 'translated' C code.

That makes a lot more sense lol.

Can confirm

Nothing about Lua would make it difficult to implement a physics engine in it compared to other languages.

Correct, but said implementation will be orders of magnitude slower than implementing at a lower level... meaning you cannot handle lots of objects, you can only handle a few, and only with a few players if this is all networked... otherwise you get massive physics calculation innacuracy, terrible performance spikes, crashes, and if networked, server hangs/stalls, huge desync, etc.

The hardest part would be integrating with Morrowind's systems. If the engine doesn't expose e.g. collision geometry to scripts in an efficient way, then you'll run into some real challenges.

I mean... that is true, that having to emulate collision meshes/hulls would be less efficient than just actually having direct access to them... but that would be the case with any language, and Lua is still much slower at any real time collision mesh/hull emulation than doing the same in a lower level language.

Even without LuaJIT, there's no reason to expect performance so bad you can't implement realtime rigid body physics. Interpreted Lua is fast, but even if it wasn't, a 60 fps performance target for physics is not tough to achieve at all.

You say that, but I've never seen it done well in a way that can scale for many tens or hundreds or thousands of 3D physics calls in a complex single player scenario, or a multiplayer scenario where you now also have to account for networked synchronization.

Not saying its impossible, just saying it... I've never seen anyone pull off an efficient and accurate 3D physics engine in Lua, untill now with this LuaJIT implementation.

If you can show me a high performance 3d physics engine written entirely in just straight up Lua, well please do show me, and share with the class.

My guess would be that it would be constrained to either specific physics scenarios, as in, wouldn't have as full a realistic physics feature set... wouldn't handle well a lot of simultaneous intersctions... but I'm open to being surprised.

...

Like uh, Godot's Jolt physics are written in C++...

...and while this used to basically be an addon, that was better than Godot's default physics engine...

...even Jolt isn't nearly as efficient or accurate as say, Valve's implementation of Havok in Source.

Godot has been catching up with Unity on this physics engine performance front, but Unity still has the performance edge by a bit, and neither are close to Source.

And these are all C++ physics implementations, to the best of my knowledge.

Exploiting Morrowind's systems is a hobby unto itself. For years, the only copy I had access to was the Xbox release (not even the GOTY edition). Without the dev console, I had to discover other ways to bend the game to my will.

To this day, I have to resist the urge to steal the Limeware Platter from the customs office, not to mention sequence breaking by phasing through the barrel with Fargoth's ring in that building's courtyard. Since you hadn't technically completed the tutorial and been released from custody yet, you could zip around the whole island, stealing with impunity and assembling quite the nest egg for your playthrough.

You can adjust the draw distance/fog amount in OpenMW, you know…

A post 1.0 goal is to be a general engine replacement for many Bethesda titles. OpenMW would be a platform for other projects to build OpenOblivion, OpenNewVegas, etc on.