[DevBlog: Lua Improvements and Changes - Discussion Thread]

13 minutes ago, FireDemon said:

Hey Guys,

 

I have tried the following code in lua:
 

list = radar.getConstructIds()

 

And the game only replies with "attempt to call a nil value (field 'getConstructIds')"

 

Could it be that these features are not implemented in the game yet?

 

Thanks for your reply,

FireDemon

Not LIVE yet

[DevBlog: Lua Improvements and Changes - Discussion Thread]

11 hours ago, Kirth Gersen said:

Drop LUA. Use WASM or JS. it's 2021 not 2003.

They're millions of people, tools (linters and ide), libraries, transpilers, etc that can produce code for WASM or JS.

 

Sure LUA is popular in gaming mainly because of World of Warcraft (WoW) addons system. But WoW is from 2003 not 2021. Back then PC were slower, with less RAM and CPU cores  and the JS ecosystem wasn't very big. LUA was a good choice back in 2003. It's not in the 2020s.

Progress have been made since then. JS came along and dominated. Now WASM it the next step. Build for the future not for 2003.

 

There are tons of UI code, physics code, atmo & space flight code, whatever code and libraries already developed. 

 

You're losing lot of skilled programmers and a huge existing base code by not using WASM for this game. Even JS is better than LUA nowadays because tons of stuff exist in JS and they're tons of transpilers to JS.

 

And we don't need an integrated 'editing' (IDE) system inside the game. WoW addons were highly popular but you couldn't code at all from the game itself. A skilled programmer won't suffer your basic in-game IDE, it's just a too bad DX (developer experience). It's ok for a few lines of code, beyond that it's just insufferable. Just drop it. Put your effort elsewhere. Provide an extension for VS Code for instance and a local validator/linter/simulator.

 

Get ride of in-game DRM for scripts too. DRM is killing this game. If you don't understand why then this game is doomed. WoW had no DRM for LUA and it was never a problem.

 

And like someone said, we need scripting for UI because the game UI is just a joke atm. So like with  WoW, we should able to rewrite the map, talents, markets, etc UI windows with our own. Just expose an API for these and let us do the work it will probably be better than the current game UI... (that's not really hard considering what we have...).

 

I may sound harsh but I'm pissed. This game had so much potential but got ruined by beginner mistakes like choosing LUA and implementing amateur UI. It's a shame.

As JS programmer for a living I can say that LUA is ok. Thanks that we can script in DU. And I think that really skilled programmers do not care what language to script also LUA is easy to learn for beginners..
Only one thing is missing is DOM manipulation of screen HUD html...

[DevBlog: Lua Improvements and Changes - Discussion Thread]

Yea I hope that we could get a player camera rotation directions as well as camera type (1-st/3-rd person)

[Lua API request: return view direction vector]

As one of a few Augmented Reality HUD lua developer for DU I can tell that there is a big need of such functions as:
1. getViewVector()
  It could return normalized direction vector in a construct local coordinates
2. getWorldViewVector()
 It could return normalized direction vector in a world coordinates
3. getPlayerCamera()
 It could return a number that represents a type of camera player is using (for example: 1-first person, 2-third person)

It could really help to sync AR with game coordinates! And make way more great stuff even for popular 3-rd person mode/
Currently at any lag we loose system.getMouseDeltaX(),system.getMouseDeltaY() data so the only way is to reset camera with lockView(1) that is not comfortable to any user. Also we can not make any 3-rd person AR because we can not predict 3-rd person view camera direction on camera switch or even detect camera switch.