source·binaries·previews·logos·tools·test suites·extras·license·versions·donations·live demo

Industry tried and true. GamePlay is 100% written in C and provides Lua bindings. Providing a very fast, and very efficient framework with scripting support. The framework uses a consistent object-oriented design throughout its many components. Import your existing (C, C, Java or Obj-C) code, bind to Lua and interpret them directly. Dozens of open-source plugins are already developed and ready to use. Clean OOP approach − Gideros provides its own class system with all the basic OOP standards, enabling you to write clean and reusable code for any of your future games. Industry tried and true. GamePlay is 100% written in C and provides Lua bindings. Providing a very fast, and very efficient framework with scripting support. The framework uses a consistent object-oriented design throughout its many components. The SDK is bundled with many Source games Source 2: C Lua: Yes 3D Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS: Dota 2 (port), The Lab (limited), Artifact, Dota Underlords, Half-Life: Alyx: Proprietary: The first game using Source 2, Dota 2, was ported over from the original Source engine. One of The Lab's minigame Robot Repair uses Source 2 engine. Using Lua with existing projects written in C/C. The Lua language provides a set of API functions for communication between C/C and the Lua programming language. You can use these functions in your C code after you include the lua.h header file or lua.hpp for C source code. You can rely on this set of functions, but sooner or later you'll.

Source

Lua isfree softwaredistributed insource code.It may be used for any purpose, including commercial purposes,at absolutely no cost.

Allversionsare available fordownload.The current version isLua 5.4and its current release isLua 5.4.3.

lua-5.4.3.tar.gz
2021-03-15, 350K
md5: ef63ed2ecfb713646a7fcc583cf5f352
sha1: 1dda2ef23a9828492b4595c0197766de6e784bc7

Tools

The main repository of Lua modules isLuaRocks.See alsoAwesome Lua.Pre-compiled Lua libraries and executables are available atLuaBinaries.Thelua-users wikilists manyuser-contributed addonsfor Lua.

Building

Lua is implemented in pure ANSI Cand compiles unmodified in all platforms that have an ANSI C compiler.Lua also compiles cleanly as C++.

Lua is very easy to build and install.There aredetailed instructionsin the packagebut here is a simple terminal session thatdownloads the current release of Luaand builds it in Linux:

If you have trouble building Lua,read the FAQ.

If you don't have the time or the inclination to compile Lua yourself,get a binaryor try thelive demo.

Giving credit

If you use Lua,please give us credit,according to ourlicense.A nice way to give us further credit is to include aLua logoand alink to our sitein a web page for your product.

Supporting Lua

You can help tosupport the Lua projectbybuying a bookpublished by Lua.organd bymaking a donation.

You can also help to spread the word about Lua by buying Lua productsatZazzle.

Last update:Mon Mar 29 11:46:07 UTC 2021

Initial Examples
More examples

Introduction

Allowing users to extend your apps with scripts it is an amazing feature. There are many languages for this purpose, but Lua is the choice today, it is powerful and easy to embed.

Lua is an important tool for many industries, it has been used inside Game Engines, Databases like Redis, and HTTP servers like Nginx, powering users to extend their features.

I will show you some essential but complete examples in how to work with Lua, I will not cover some deep concepts behind the language, installation and other topics like LuaJIT.

Another thing that I will not cover is how to compile and link your app with Lua library, if you know a little about C you can do it with almost no effort using the official manual, the goal here is talking about examples and how to use the API. But if you do not know how to do, check my repository link with examples at the end of this article.

Installation

How I said I do not cover the installation of Lua development libraries, because it varies and depends on your platform.You can look at the installation guide in the official website here.

Some Lua Concepts

It is important you understand at least one concept before, the virtual stack. Lua uses a virtual stack to pass values to and from C.

All communication between lua code and your application works using the virtual stack. You push data from C for defining global variables, tables, functions and function arguments. Lua VM will be made all this data available inside Lua script. When a Lua code calls a C function, for example, inside the function you have to recover the arguments and push the result again to Lua.

Another example is when you need to call from C a Lua function. You have to call an API function to let Lua knows which function should be put onto the stack to be available to C call it.

Now you are ready to start coding.

Starting Lua VM

The basic code that we need to call when we use Lua C API is as follow. We start declaring a lua_State pointer and initialize it with luaL_newstate() function.

Note that versions before 5.3 lua_open() is used instead.

It is our pointer to our Lua Virtual Machine and this lua_State store all data that we share between Lua and C. We can have many Lua states to run scripts with different contexts.

After opening a state, we are ready to call functions from Lua API.

One important function to be called is luaL_openlibs, it makes available the Lua Standard Library for the code that we will run afterwards. It is not a requirement, but without this you will not be able to call functions from libraries like math, io, string, utf8, inside Lua code.

You can also open only the libraries that you know it will be useful or safe to allow scripts to call, see the example bellow, more information here.

After using the lua state, when you do not need to execute anything else, you have to close the state with:

Initial Examples

I wrote some examples of basic operations like running Lua code from a string, loading a script file, exposing variables and C functions to Lua code, recovering the values from global variables inside the Lua code and calling Lua function in C.

Initializing Lua VM

Here is our first example, it is a starting point for using Lua with C.

Let's dissect the code structure. We start adding the headers:

Start a new Lua state:

With L state your now able to call Lua C API.

Open the Lua standard libraries, like math, string, utf8, io, etc.:

After using Lua we need to close the state:

Running Lua code

This example shows how to load a Lua code from string and run it.

The new things here are the API functions: luaL_loadstring, that is in charge of loading the code chunk on the top of the stack, lua_pcall is in charge of running the code in the stack, and if the execution is successfull, we remove the code from the top(lua_gettop) of the stack with lua_pop.

More examples

Before continuing the examples I have to explain some updates made in the article.

After the feedback that I received, I decided to make the following examples more clear and simple using some macros available from Lua API.

The following changes were made:

Instead of using lua_pcall, luaL_loadstring, and luaL_loadfile, I modified the code to use:
- luaL_dostring, which is equivalent to calling lua_pcall and luaL_loadstring
- luaL_dofile, which is equivalent to calling lua_pcall and luaL_loadfile
- use lua_pcall on

C++ Lua Game