Big List of Lua Resources!

Post links and I may add to the main list. Admins feel free to edit directly to modify and add links.

Learn Lua

Tools

Lua Libraries

OO in Lua

Collections of Lua Snippets

Websites / Communities / Events About Lua

Lua Style Guides

Other Lua game engines

Tutorials etc. written for these can be adapted to Defold

General gamedev resources

34 Likes

What about Atom (atom.io) as an IDE?


Your mileage may vary, but personally I’ve found that Atom works great as an IDE for a multitude of languages, including Lua as I recently discovered. It’s also quite easy to get it set up to work properly with Defold. The package for Lua support (language-lua) recognizes the .lua extension, so for any scripts you open you need to specify them as Lua files with the shortcut control-shift-L (same shortcut on OS X, not command but control).

5 Likes

As far as I know, the advantage of ZeroBrane over Atom is that you can do remote Lua debugging with ZeroBrane. Since Defold doesn’t have real debugging, working with an IDE that does support this can come in handy :slight_smile:

3 Likes

I use Atom with linter-luaparse package installed. I highly recommend it. Very useful package with dynamic error highlighting.

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And one more tip for Atom.
just add this code to config.cson (Atom->Config) for auto-detect script files as lua:

core:
customFileTypes:
‘source.lua’: [
‘script’,
‘render_script’
]
http://flight-manual.atom.io/using-atom/sections/basic-customization/#_customizing_language_recognition

And one more link to “Learn Lua”:
Learn Lua in 15 Minutes

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How to convince Atom to show symbols list (cmd+r)? I only get “No symbols found” message.

1 Like

Lua Finite State Machine - https://github.com/kyleconroy/lua-state-machine

6 Likes

Hi guys, just started to tinker with Defold and also just started learning Lua. If you are coming from a JavaScript background like I am, I found a couple of resources that may help with the transition (authored by the same guy who wrote Learn Lua in 15 Minutes, Tyler Neylon).

I found these set of links to be very useful in quickly building up a mental model of using Lua. Highlighting the similarities between JS and Lua is helping me to reuse my knowledge in JS in the context of Lua.

Looking at the similarities between JS and Lua, certain JS patterns might be applicable to Lua (and most likely have already been implemented in Lua based from the other links, and given that Lua is a very mature language already). So, as a reference, I am also adding here the link to the JS Patterns book by Addy Osmani

7 Likes

Not Lua specific but I always found this book extremely useful in whatever language or platform you are using:

Game Programming Patterns

It is a free online book (just look for the Web link towards the end of the page). If you want to understand the inner workings of game engines (or if you just need guidance on how to implement certain patterns), including Defold, check out this book.

Topics of note for the Defold user:

If you are curious why Entity-Component-Systems (ECS) are all the rage, then you need to check out the chapter about Data Locality.

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Was looking for this “Resource List” for a while, now I’m bumping it so other newcomers can find/see it too.

Also adding/recommending new resources & code editor for the list:

Visual Studio Code – open source code editor

with plugins:

For future refrence:

Introduction to Lua on Ravi language (Lua superset language) site explains a lot about Lua and also provides additional FAQ kind of information.

Terra - it’s Lua and it’s Lua in Lua but the other Lua is statically-typed, compiled language with manual memory management… so basically Lua interface for C within Lua itself. (yeah explaining this little gem is quite something) – beta 1.0.0 for now :smiley:

6 Likes

Very good video on Lua - from beginners to masters:

2 Likes