Monthly Archives: January 2012

My new job starts on Tuesday and I’ve been asked to start looking into LUA, a language it appears that is pretty simple to get to grips with, mainly because it’s not overly fussy about syntax.

Anyway, this is new territory to me (to some degree). I’ve only been building games for just over a year now, mainly using Stencly which is a great platform for picking up the basics of Development without the headache of having to learn the code and syntax. That isn’t to say Stencly is a toy, in-fact it’s quite the opposite, it’s very, very powerful and allows for full code edit, if you wish. But what I really like about Stencly is the graphical interface. It’s laid out like puzzle pieces and it makes you think about what you are putting where and why. This is proving to be very beneficial when looking into new languages.

Back to LUA, the first thing I wanted was an environment to dev in. It took me a while but I finally found a program called Scite for Windows. Looked perfect, I could test my code in the program and see the results along with debugging options and syntax highlights etc etc.

I wanted to write a simple little program that would pass or fail details, so using their tutorial that details the basic syntax I set out to create my test, within an hour I had my script ready! I thought I would share what I’ve done in-case anyone else sets out down this path.

–Testing comments so you shouldn’t see this!

Print command uses this format. Print (“Print This”) for text. You can also embed simple mathmatics equations in the brackets for example print (2 + 2) which will result in only the number 4 being printed.

–Testing print command, you should see this!
print (“This is a Simple little script”)

In this paragraph we create a new table using the “{ }”, but first you must name it. In this case the table is named “who”. who = {Table data here}. At this stage we have a table but no data, so simply populate the table. In the example I hold two pieces on information, firstname and surname. (note the quotations and format)

–Create a new empty table to hold the status of who.
who = { firstname = “Ben”, surname=”Simms” }

Each table has a unique ID, I discovered in test’s that this id changes every-time the script is run, so I’m not really sure what it’s purpose is. Maybe if you have multiple tables they all get a unique ID while the script is running. Any, you can find the table ID by printing it.

–Show me the unqiue table ID.

print (“This is the tables unqiue ID”)
print (who)

–print out the value name from the table.
print (“firstname: ” ..who.firstname)
print (“Surname: ” ..who.surname)

Here’s the part where we check the data. a single equal (=) would mean “make a equal  b” but a double equals (==) means, check that the result equals the expected result. That’s exactly what we do here, we check my first name from the table (who) is == to Ben and if it is, print Passed. If it’s not Ben then it’s something else so print Fail.

–Check to see if firstname is Ben if it is print “Pass” otherwise print “fail”
if who.firstname == (“Ben”)
–Print out a response
then print (“Firstname Passed”)
else print (“Firstname Failed”)
end

–Check to see if surname is Simms if it is print “Pass” otherwise print “fail”
if who.surname == (“Simms”)
then print (“Surname Passed”)
else print (“Surname Failed”)
end

This is just showing the same test but we check both pieces of data in one line rather than two paragraphs.

– Same test as above but compressed.
if who.firstname ==(“Ben”) and who.surname ==(“Simms”)
then print (“User details passed”)
else print (“user details failed”)
end

Later, I added this little chunk of code in, it changes the value of passed. and failed. to add one if there has been a pass or fail. At the end of the script I print out the value of these two, to give a number of passed and failed results!

then print (“Firstname Passed” )
passed.value= (passed.value +1)
else print (“Firstname Failed” )
failed.value= (failed.value +1)
end

So that’s it for now, my first exposure to LUA and I quite like it,