First, and most importantly, this isn't an official NovaQuark project, and I don't have any idea what the interfaces in the actual game will look like, I'm basing most of this off of the LUA Dev blog and my knowledge of how C/C++ bindings are exposed to LUA. If they want me to change the name of this I'll be happy to. Secondly, I have no idea where this topic belongs so I'm posting it here in General. I think we need a programming-related subforum but that likely won't happen until Alpha at the soonest.
Over the Holidays I was thinking about tools I could work on now that might be of some interest to people out there. Things like a ship crew scheduling app, a wiki for programmers, a timeline site keeping track of DU events, a ship delivery scheduling utility, etc. Ultimately, however, I kept coming back to this idea, as it would help me while learning a new language for my job and it would help people who don't know much about LUA (or programming in general) start to wrap their head around what it might be like in DU (as well as help some of those AI-projects out there).
I came up with the idea to create a Core Unit "Emulator" as a standalone web service that people can target with LUA scripts.
I'll try to explain what this looks like...
A programmer would set up LUA on their computer, install the LUA sockets module, as well as copy a piece of code into their own projects that would bootstrap them into being able to communicate with a server over the net.
From there, function calls into an object would act as calls to a "Core Unit", which under the hood would really just be some socket communications going on to a server doing all of the actual work.
From the perspective of a programmer, they get access to various details about a ship (speed, velocity, pitch, yaw, rotation, etc) that they have to adjust to meet a set of parameters (per round) after a simulation is run. So your scripts would have to account for things like losing an engine, running low on fuel, turbulence, etc. and ultimately get the ship into a given set of passing parameters within a given period of time.
Alternatively, I could write a standalone program that you use to run your scripts against, it doesn't particularly matter to me if it's a remote service or not.
How does this help new programmers? It would give the ability for people to try writing LUA in a way that resembles what LUA programming in games is actually like.
It won't be what Dual Universe is exactly like, none of us have the ability to write something like that because we can't know what the interfaces actually are. However, it will give you enough experience in LUA to be able to adapt what you learn very quickly. Ultimately it comes down to having a set of elements giving you information via function calls, processing that information, and being able to do things with said elements via other function calls. If you can get around that basic concept then you'll be in a much better position overall.
It would give people an excuse to start learning LUA now, but it won't be very "fun" or realistic, and you'd have to use it knowing that it's not like Dual Universe at all. There probably wouldn't really be graphics either, you'd be flying by sensors only...
I'd even love some help building it on the server side, which I'm currently doing in Golang because I have to learn it for my job. It's not super difficult to program in, but it would certainly be cool to have a helping hand on programming the actual physics side of things. I just don't want to do it all myself, although things like this tend to go that way.
All in all, I'd be willing to help people learn LUA along the way as well, provided you have some knowledge about computers already. You could easily take what you learn and apply it to other games that are scripted through LUA as well (WoW is one of them).
Who would be interested in even using something like this?
I guess I should make a video explaining all of this, as this wall of text is probably too verbose.
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