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Oddly enough, Lua was my first introduction to programming. I was into Valve's Half Life games and Garry's Mod, and Lua was typically the way that you'd make mo
by austinl 6y ago
Oddly enough, Lua was my first introduction to programming. I was into Valve's Half Life games and Garry's Mod, and Lua was typically the way that you'd make modifications to things (e.g. increase player movement speed). That would interact with the Source engine, which was in C++, but you could do a lot of stuff without ever touching C++ [1].
I didn't even really think of it as programming at the time. You start by just changing constants, like what if we make gravity = 2 instead of 9.8 m/s2? And then build up from there. I think is what a lot of these educational programming games try to replicate today.
After a while, I got confident enough to the point of trying to do things in LÖVE, which is a free and open-source 2D game engine that uses Lua [2]. What I learned there is the reason why I eventually studied computer science in college. That said, when I return to Lua, it feels a bit limited, but I suppose that's the point! I never really questioned it at the time.
"Lua is not object-oriented. That is it." Laughed out loud when I read this. It was funny to learn programming without the concept of classes, and then realize that Lua is the exception, not the rule.
[1] https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Embedding_Lua_in_the_Source_Engine https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Embedding_Lua_in_th...
[2] https://love2d.org/ https://love2d.org/
- andrewmcwatters 6y agoThanks for linking my article. I went on to go build Half-Life 2: Sandbox as an open-source competitor to Garry's Mod, and later Planimeter's Grid Engine, which is also based on LÖVE.[1] [1]: https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/ https://www.planimeter.org/grid-sdk/
- deergomoo 6y agoLua was mine too, also via games. I’d installed custom firmware on my PSP and after getting my fill of emulators and rampant piracy, I wanted to see if I could make a game. Getting the C-based toolchain working was far beyond 12yo me at the time, but there was a “Lua Player” homebrew application that would load scripts off the memory stick. I didn’t get far with it and to be honest I remember very little, but it did set me off down the rabbit hole of learning to program, and now it’s both my career and a big passion.
- leke 6y agoI'm currently playing with Lua in Roblox studio. It's a lot of fun.