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The Future of LUA IG ...


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Hi all,

 

i'm not sure if this is the right section of the forum to post this topic, but as you can guess it apppears to me to be adequate.

Also forgive me my bad English, specially because this post is quite long

 

As a hobby developer i love the possibility to program in LUA IG. That said i encounter so much frustration because of limitations that are currently IG.

I searched the forums and Discord to see if i can get answers to my questions, but in the end nothing helped me. so i'm here :)

 

I'm not posting here to rage about those limitations, but as i'm engaging a fairly high amount of time in realizing things i wonder if this work will not get useless after some future updates.

So i'm coming up with some questions about future features of DU LUA.

 

Before diving into LUA details let me give you the understanding i have of the vison DU has.

 

For me DU is a root level sand box where players will build and realize the content and environnement. DU call itself a game where players will build civilisations.

with the current balance and the scale of building things like civilisation, or even more humble let's say a town, it requires a lot of time to gather, transform and build. And that is the easy part. The more difficult job is to make a project appealing in order to seduce players in joining. From then you need to manage, organise, control, and plan things.

Again at the scale we are  talking about you'll probably have dozens of players and as much tasks to manage. Thus you will handle huge amounts of data and communication.

 

That's the point were i want LUA join the party.

Event Calendars, accounting of players activity, Task management, Statistics, just to list some

In the current state those thing will not be possible because of missing API features and existing restrictions.

So here a list of things that i'm interested in knowing if they will find somehow a way into the game or if it's already known that they are a no go

 

System

Will there be a GUI API that allows interaction (mouse and/or keyboard handling) on screen elements, HUD ?

Will there be a documentation about rules for CPU overload evaluation ?

Will the LUA code size limit stay or change ?

Will the screen element content size stay or change ?

Will player accounts be IRL verified ? i mean will we be able to detect multi account players ?

 

Data Storage

Will there be some client side storage ?

Will there be some server side storage ?

Will there be some évolutions of the IG Databank in terms of storage space and APIs like CRUD like sql) ?

 

Messaging

Will there be a way to send messages to another player in a hidden system channel reserved for LUA messaging ?

Will there be a way to post send messages to chat (all default channels and private channels) ?

Will there be a way to interact from LUA with a server on Internet like a discord or web server ?

Will receivers / emitters have some more features like private communication vs broadcasting ?

 

Core API

Will there be a way to see the size (XS,S,M,L,XL) of an element ( getElementSizeyId(id) ) ?

Will there be a way to modify link between elements ?

Will there be a way to interact with RDMS like adding or removing people/orgs in Actors, elements in Tags ?

Will there be more ranks in orgs and will there be a way to edit memberships from LUA ?

Will it be possible to gather more data from players API like orgs memberships and/or talent tree ?

Will it be possible to rename elements ?

 

IG Storage

Will there be a way to get the container inventory ?

If yes will there be a way to get the owners (claim) for each item stack ?

 

Industry

Will there be a way to set recipe?

Will the be a way to set the amount to craft ?

 

That's the most important for me that i remembered during posting this.

I'm sure i missed a lot of questions that are important, like all the piloting related stuff for example.

 

i Wonder what you guys are thinking about my questions and hopefully those skilled in other LUA IG mechanics add their question if they feel like me ;)

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

Seems like finding any information regarding LUA and the game is pretty difficult.  There is one very simple tutorial from 3 years ago on the DU Youtube channel and virtually nothing else.  More info is always welcome.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I have been playing around with the in game Lua features, and this is my observation... 

 

I think they don't want Lua to be used to design any game-changing features. Essentially, they don't want players who are Lua coders or have coders in their org to have an unfair advantage against those that don't have the power of programming on their side.

 

They're completely fine with us making pretty screens and displays, little "flavor" features like that, but I have a feeling they are specifically against us doing things like automating factories entirely with Lua, or making fighter drones, or sharing data between constructs over vast distances, so on and so on. Anything that changes the game beyond having a pretty interface to interact with the game is probably out of the question.

 

This is very frustrating for people like me who want to create game-changing features through programming, but I have a feeling that these restrictions are by design, and not just by neglecting to make the functions we want. 


I could be wrong, but looking at the current state of the game, that's the feeling I'm getting from what we're allowed to do with Lua vs what we're not.

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I have a shop in a S core in our org’s and I have a factory in a L core at a different location. I’d like to be able to have a screen at my factory telling me my stock levels at my shop so I know what to grab for a stock run. Seems it should be simple, but it’s between cores. It would b sad if the only way I could do it would be a screen shot, or having to go there in a Br pod rather than having a display on the factory floor.

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On 9/20/2020 at 5:51 PM, MevNav said:

I have been playing around with the in game Lua features, and this is my observation... 

 

I think they don't want Lua to be used to design any game-changing features. Essentially, they don't want players who are Lua coders or have coders in their org to have an unfair advantage against those that don't have the power of programming on their side.

 

They're completely fine with us making pretty screens and displays, little "flavor" features like that, but I have a feeling they are specifically against us doing things like automating factories entirely with Lua, or making fighter drones, or sharing data between constructs over vast distances, so on and so on. Anything that changes the game beyond having a pretty interface to interact with the game is probably out of the question.

 

This is very frustrating for people like me who want to create game-changing features through programming, but I have a feeling that these restrictions are by design, and not just by neglecting to make the functions we want. 


I could be wrong, but looking at the current state of the game, that's the feeling I'm getting from what we're allowed to do with Lua vs what we're not.

I just want drones that lawn-dart into other drones/ships/objects.

Also, those pretty screens and displays can also have button areas that can fire off commands / other scripts that do things elsewhere on the core.  I'm not talking about the button element, but actual areas you can click on in the screen.  Pretty nifty.  Can even set it to automatically plot warp jumps, plot direction of travel in space (probably on planet), etc.  Lots of little things that require just a tiny bit of input for a lot of ... not advantage, but comfort?  ease of use?  something like that.

 

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TBH, I have no idea why the container does not have more functions, specifically related to percentage of its max volume filled or what items are currently inside of it. That shouldn't be too game-breaking to include... maybe we'll get that in the future?

 

We MIGHT see some way to transmit data further than 500 meters away in the future, but I wouldn't count on it. Until then, the 500m transmitters seem to be the only way to transfer data between constructs. 

 

You could, theoretically, build a relay system that would transfer data from one point to the next to carry data even further... but you would need to have an active program board at every 500 m waypoint. Not very practical. 

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13 minutes ago, MevNav said:

 

 

We MIGHT see some way to transmit data further than 500 meters away in the future, but I wouldn't count on it. Until then, the 500m transmitters seem to be the only way to transfer data between constructs. 

Haven’t tested and currently at work, can we put a transmitter and boards in a ship?

 

The idea would be go to my shop, jump in my stock refilling ship, click on its sales screen. It grabs the sales report and tells the shop it has it, refresh’s. Then I fly to my factory, land, click on the sales screen at the factory, and it brings it up there from the ship. Then I know what needs to be restocked.

 

Thats what I need since my shop can’t talk to my factory 8km away

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8 minutes ago, CoyoteNZ said:

Haven’t tested and currently at work, can we put a transmitter and boards in a ship?

 

The idea would be go to my shop, jump in my stock refilling ship, click on its sales screen. It grabs the sales report and tells the shop it has it, refresh’s. Then I fly to my factory, land, click on the sales screen at the factory, and it brings it up there from the ship. Then I know what needs to be restocked.

 

Thats what I need since my shop can’t talk to my factory 8km away

Ah, now THAT is possible. A little tricky, but possible. 

 

The current work-around for the short range of transmitters is to carry data with ships using databanks. You jump in your ship, download the data onto your ship's databank at point A, fly to point B, and then upload the data into point B's databank. 

 

This is 100% possible. A bit of a pain in the butt, simply because you have to fly your ship back and forth between the two places, but possible. 

 

Edit: Oh, one thing to keep in mind if you do something like this... the character '*' is the wildcard character. This means you're going to want to set up your receiver's event to be something like receiver.receive(data_in, *), and then you can do something like:

 

system.print(message)

... to print the message that it receives. Without this, you can only set up events for specific messages being received on specific channels. 

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guys, we are in 2529 and need to send pigeons to transfert data ?

but we have google docs :)

it seems a bit salty and it is.

On one hand we have the goal to build civilisations and on the other we lack in tools to manage it.

I understand the concern of keeping the game fair to all players. But i recently seen a statement that it's not fair to have players without advanced Lua skills being disadvantaged. That's true and not true.

See simply the power an organisation has on the ressource side. The more you gather the richer you become. The richer you are, more richer you will become. So there is already a disadvantage. And in my understanding a player can choose to apply to an org that has what he wants or there will be ways or alternatives he can buy with ingame money.

 

But what if a technology is not sold and gives an org an huge advantage ? 

They already have it with a big player base. so where is the point ?

 

I guess we have to wait that things evolve :)

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A couple of things...

 

would be be great if we could place relay towers with out having to place cores. A chain of relay towers gets very hard if every core is counted against your limit.

 

does anybody know if relays/transmitters have to be yours, or if a district had public ones you could use them?

 

on the container contents really hope they work on it, but remember that you can get contents mass, so if only one type of item in container you can get item count by dividing content mass by item mass.

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