About the Tutorial
From GMod Wiki
| Lua: Lua in Garry's Mod |
 Description: | This is an introduction to the lua language in general and is a recommended read if you are a beginner. |
 Original Author: | theJ89 |
 Contributors: | The community |
 Created: | May 9, 2008 |
Introduction
A lua file is called a script, it's plain text. To create and edit these scripts you need a plain text editor such as notepad.
You can use any text editor, but to make your life easier, we recommend that you use Notepad++.
For the sake of simplicity we'll refer to both as "notepad".
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Warning: Do not use Wordpad. It is a formatted text editor, not a plain text editor. It will put useless tags in around your code that will cause it to fail when loading. As a rule of thumb, if you can have text that uses two different fonts in one file, then it is not a plain text editor. |
Creating the script
For our first script, we're not going to do anything too complex. We'll learn how to send a message to the console.
Type the following code into your chosen editor :
print("Hello world");
You're done! Wasn't that easy? It should have been.
Explanation
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print is a function. A function is a command that does something when you call it. Many functions can take arguments, which is data you give the function to change exactly what it does. In this case, print() takes only one argument, which is a string (a series of letters, numbers, spaces, and so on), and when Msg() is called, it puts that string into the console in Garry's Mod. |
Saving the script
You're now ready to create the actual Lua script file. To find your lua folder follow the following path - this may be slightly different on your computer, but will look something like this:
C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\<steamname>\garrysmod\garrysmod\lua\
In the filename box, type helloworld.lua (Note that you must specify .lua), and in the Save As type box, select All Files. Now, just press enter (or press the save button) to save your script.
Running the script
To run any of your scripts you need to be playing a map. Now, open the console and type the following :
lua_openscript helloworld.lua
Press enter. If you did everything correctly up to this point you should see a message in the console :
Hello World!
The script has done exactly what you told it to.
This is just the bare basics. We'll move onto more sophisticated things in the following pages.
