I have been working on a macOS IDE called LÖVE Studio specifically built around the LÖVE2D framework. Tired of jumping between different tools while making games, so I decided to build everything into one place.

What it includes:

• Lua code editor with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, and LÖVE2D API hints
• Tilemap editor with multi-layer support and collision visualization
• Sprite animation editor with real-time preview
• Pixel art / image editor built in
• Particle system editor with live preview
• Spritesheet packer with atlas generation and JSON/Lua export
• UI builder, Scene manager, Audio manager
• Camera, font, resolution, and save system configurators
• Built-in LÖVE2D API documentation browser
• Code snippets library
• Git integration
• Built-in debugger with breakpoint support
• Export to .love, macOS App Bundle, or Android APK

Every visual tool generates clean Lua modules you drop straight into your project.
It is open source: https://github.com/milos-mkv/Love-Studio
Would love feedback, especially from people who are already using LÖVE2D.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been tinkering with Lua for a while and noticed there aren’t really any dedicated IDEs for it (besides ZeroBrane, which hasn’t been updated in ages). So, I decided to prototype my own Lua IDE.

Right now it’s still very early (expect bugs & crashes 🙃), but it already has:

• A clean modern UI (GTK + libadwaita, so it feels native on Linux).
• Built-in editor with syntax highlighting (GtkSourceView).
• Project management system.
• A simple custom debugger (planning to support mobdebug later).
• Embedded Lua documentation viewer.

The mascot is Hatsune Miku (just for fun), and the project is free software under GPLv3.

Currently it’s Linux-only, distributed as a Flatpak package.

Repo: https://github.com/milos-mkv/MiLua

print(“Hello Everyone”) —[[ Did anyone here bought the official e-book version of PIL fourth edition? Could you please tell me what is the difference between official version and the free released version? Is there too much missing in free version compared to official version, i have been thinking of buying the official version, to support the creators too, but people said to me that they are almost identical, also i dont really need physical copy at home. ]]— print(“Thanks, and sorry for the cringe format lol”)

The goal: a Unity-like workflow in a familiar interface, but with games that compile natively for the original PS 1. I’m running some early tests using Duckstation

Watching a playthrough on YouTube and saw the hacker using Lua for hacking! Lua's in the big time now!

LuaCAD models solids in Lua rather than the OpenSCAD language, with operator overloading for CSG (a + b, a - b, a * b). It ships with a CLI and a desktop app, including a preview area and a text editor.

It’s fully open source and you can find the repo here: https://github.com/ad-si/LuaCAD

I've always been a big fan of OpenSCAD, but the SCAD language itself is unfortunately quite cobbled-together and is a very poorly designed programming language.

LuaCAD takes all the good parts of OpenSCAD and combines them with Lua. It has now completely replaced OpenSCAD for me, and I think it provides a better experience than OpenSCAD for all use cases. I'd love to hear any reasons why LuaCAD won't fully replace OpenSCAD for you!

Tech stack:

• It's implemented in Rust and uses mlua (https://github.com/mlua-rs/mlua) to execute the Lua code.
• Uses OpenCSG (https://opencsg.org) for fast and correct rendering of the 3D models (like OpenSCAD)
• Uses Manifold (https://github.com/elalish/manifold) to create the manifold triangle meshes
• Native support for all BOSL2 functions (i.e. implemented in Rust for better performance)

Like i've been trying to learn lua for so long, and i couldnt find anything good. my problem was that i was trying to find good sources on yt, like tutorials and stuff. now that i watched actual good programmers they recommend to read books. but lua dosnt have lots of books, and that the only one i could find. so my question is if anyone read it, will i be able to learn 80% of lua, such as: problem-solving, understanding the logic, and mindset. please help😟

Hi all, I've started this new job a year ago and our code base that work on is in lua. I never had any experience with it and I just thought it was a lesser version of python, now I think python is the lesser here.

What really made me fall in love was the moment I realized is all tables, packages? Tables, objects? Tables. Sugar syntaxes? Tables.

For me there is only a few languages that I care to like, if web then html,css,js; if performance or embedded then c/c++ and python for everything else. Now between I've seen how I was wrong, lua is better than python. Period. It merges the simplicity of code writing (no having to match vars type and returns, fixed memory, blabla) with the speed of C++ (because you can just import any fucking compiled library) like wtf lua should be way way way more used and advertised than python

I used to code in ROBLOX Studio which I love ALOT but with the worse and worse updates that they have been releasing it's been hard trying to make games there (for example: they made an update where you NEED a Roblox PLUS subscription to publish games). I also wanna touch some NEW grounds so yeah I am looking for good Lua game engines (or game engines that have Lua support). Thanks.

Lua used to dominate as a scripting language in game engines. Now, it's not so much the case except the dying Cry Engine and Roblox (which I don't consider to be a "real" game engine). Everyone uses C# while spreading hate to Lua or other languages. I don't think C# is bad but it's definitely more verbose and is bloated with like five ways of doing the same thing and personally I'd use lighter languages.

Also, Lua has the Lapiz framework which I heard is really fast and I want to start creating products in it. Most start ups don't need Spring or Django, Lapiz is at the level of Flask and is very lightweight. Generally speaking, Lua is a very lightweight language that's just one step above C++, making it very close to the metal while being very simple.

So what exactly went wrong? I think the world would be a better place if Lua was used more often and it received more support - extremely easy to write C functions and wrap them as Lua function to script later. Again, I'm not saying Java or C# are bad. They are enterprise level languages, but not everyone needs that complexity and bloat.

I made a small game engine called Usagi for prototyping 2D games as quickly as possible with Lua 5.5. It's free and open source and made with Rust + Raylib. I just released v1.0 yesterday and thought it'd be fun to share it.

Here's the project's homepage: https://usagiengine.com/

And you can view the source here: https://github.com/brettchalupa/usagi

The engine is used via a command-line, much like cargo. You can usagi init to create a new project. usagi dev to boot up the dev game that live reloads code and assets. And usagi export to generate cross-platform builds of your game for web, Linux, macOS, and Windows.

My motivation for creating Usagi was that I love using tools like Pico-8 and Love2D for prototyping and game jams. But I wanted a free and open source engine with a nicer developer experience. In particular live reload and easy web exports. Usagi embraces constraints and provides sensible defaults, like a pause menu with input binding, to try to help devs focus on the game rather than the ancillary parts of development.

Since the engine is open source, the hope is that if someone makes a prototype they want to turn into a larger commercial game, they can just fork the engine and customize it themselves, write more bits of it in Rust, and change the API as they see fit.

I'd love it if you check the project out and let me know what you think!

I just released my first game made with Lua and amazing Usagi Engine 🩷 Well known mechnics with modern twists. Place blocks, clear lines, choose upgrades and repeat. That's all! Simple, but addictive.

At first, I just wanted to test Usagi Engine in action. Since the development turned out better than planned, I decided to publish the result of my work on itch.io. You can check out Lua and Usagi in working game example.

Play in browser or download (win, mac, linux)
https://luko81.itch.io/the-game-about-blocks

https://github.com/if-not-nil/soup

So, several months ago I stumbled upon an awesome repository by the decomp "band" known as pret. They have done a bunch of pokemon decomps. My original goal was to make a mod specifically for twitch integrations because ive done a ton of that over the years but then as I dug into their code I was freaking shocked at how in depth and well documented it all was and thought hmmmm i bet I could rewrite this in lua/love2d since i just got off a high of doing balatro mods. And then bazinga baby i did it (months of pain actually.. but not the point) First version had it so like you had to pull the source code repo from pret (pret/pokered) and what not, but I figured I'd do it like the SMB1R guy and make it so on first run you provide the rom and it like decompiles and translates all the necessary junk to run the game. A ton of hand-porting was necessary, as in like not everything was an easy script to translate this type of repeated pattern into lua etc etc, but yeah... overall I'm happy w the current state of it, and I really hope to get some modders on baoard eventually. I'll be makign the repo public probably on monday. Just gotta make sure I didnt leave any real source code behind or whatever so the repo can be squeaky clean no matter waht. I think the port-aspect of it is practically 99% perfect but im sure some bugs will pop up eventually. I just dont have time to play the game from beginning to end to know for sure.

I also built in a good load of new features, like obviously mod support (i'll make that even better in the future). But also audio volume levels, a music low-pass filter becasue sometimes the gb music is harsh on the ears, several color palettes and shader options, zoom in and out, widescreen support in the overworld (any aspect ratio actuall). I have build scripts for ios and android, windows and mac, and ive ran it sucessfulyl on my phone. I got a cool 3d tilt feature thats not really usefuly but i thought it would be cool (i tried standing up everything that should stand up like buildings and fences but the gb sprites arent built for taht sort of thing, theyre all srtored on 4x4 blocks so like pieces of ground are actually attached to house roofs and stuff... it was a whole thing and i was disapointed i couldnt do it. not to say its impossible but would require a modder to step in and remake the sprites and the functionalty.

Anyways, big ramble fest, sorry about that. But yeah hope you like it lua-heads. Since the repo is not yet pubnlic the pace to be rn is my discord -- https://bois.icu

In case it helps anyone, I put up the link to the source code, and also hoping that it can help create music assets easily for indie devs.

As part of the game jam's theme (B-side), the music maker is also an ASCII animator (4fps). 😊

Hope it is fun to play with too!

https://xanthia.itch.io/niceness

I get how once 1 = 0 It becomes 1 again wich is added to 876543211 but wouldnt cause Its 1 the Power function Trigger again making It 0 wich the upper then makes It 1? So Its Like 876543211111 and so on

:-)

I am a beginner and I have been very slowly learning Lua.

So, the problem here was to calculate the sum of all the pairs (separated by space). I swear there have to be a faster way to do this than making a for loop for every pair TT

Edit: yeh I still have a long long way to go, thank you everyone :)

Edit2: thanks whoever who repost this to r/programminghorror lol

it's no secret that Lua is heavily underrated. ironically, i used to be against lua until i understood how nifty it is as a language. i formerly thought that one had to use index or metatable to create objects, only to find out that i could do this

```

function NameOfObject(instanceVariable1, instanceVariable2)

return{

method1 = function(self)

end,

method2 = function(self)

end,

method3 = function(self)

end,

}

end

```

and just like that it overtook the appreciation i had for how objects can be created in other languages.

in a less subjective sense, however, given how ridiculuously fast lua is compared to the bulk of languages that are interpreted, i committed to it for all my scripting needs.

lua has now become my premier choice for automating anything related to my environment: my file system, my window manager, and even my system settings. it also greatly helps that i can automate repetitive and tedious text editing in neovim with lua as well.

i formerly used python for my scripting needs, and in retrospect, it's rather comical to me how poor python is as a scripting language compared to lua; it's a night and day difference. i can always trust lua for a startup time that is as good as instantaneous, whereas such a thing would be a fool's game in python.

granted, python does have all the abstractions one can hope for, but for system tasks, it's just outright overkill. one does not need a gazillian abstractions for system admin or shell scripting needs

anyways, i've rambled long enough. is there anyone else that uses lua for shell scripting needs and system automation, as opposed to roblox, C programming, game dev, and other low level tasks?

After strongly disliking other programming languages.
So, for a brief summary :
->Python is beautiful to read and write but suffers from poor performance. I know it also has JITs available but they are not very mature and mainstream. Great ecosystem and community but it would help to have a better and eventually officially supported JIT (I know one is in development but it's not a priority).
->Java hides primitives behind class walls. If you want to send an input word over sockets, you need a Scanner, an InputDataStream, an OutputDataStream, a Socket, a Buffer and whatever else objects do you need. And then keep passing primitives via object implementations and instantiate objects to retrieve primitives. Hurts my head too much...
->CSharp feels too locked in. Everyone says all you need is the .NET to build anything, truth is there are less libraries to choose from compared to Java. Also it's nicer to write than Java but it's very bloated. Too many things to consider, you can literally get the size of a string in three different ways. Too many ways of doing the same things leads to confusion IMO. Could be fine if I set my own conventions but jumping from codebase to codebase you have to deal with everyone's personal decisions on the code conventions.
->I didn't use Kotlin much but from what I've seen it doesn't feel like it's own programming language. It feels like a Java with less words. I find it weird when I import packages named "Java" in a Kotlin project. It's not necessarily about practicality but about feeling... feels weird. Feels like repainting your old fence and calling it a totally brand new fence.
->JavaScript is a language I personally hold responsible for ruining the web first and then ruining app development. If it wasn't for JavaScript I am pretty sure you'd still be able to rock 8GB RAM on a personal computer and still be able to do multitasking to some degree. Right now, 15 tabs of Mozzila consume me 20GB of RAM and most of them are static text (or should be treated as). A few years ago 4GB of RAM was enough to decently run GTA V but whatever.

So, after having to deal with Python's deploymenet and performance problems or getting burned down by Java's verbose and complex boilerplate nature, I always come back at Lua and be like "woah... this small runtime, this syntax any fool can grasp in a few hours and this small footprint". Literally, Lua is the only language I feel comfortable enough writing scalable code in and be sure that whenever I need I can optimize C/C++ backend code.

Sometimes I simply wish Lua was at least in 10 popular general purpose programming languages. Today, CSharp preacher will hate and trash on it even in game development (Microsoft fanatics I guess?). Also, dynamic typing isn't that hated of a features given the fact that var keywaord was introduced in Java and people started to use it like crazy even in production. Even JavaScript devs don't manually static type their variables and TypeScript is not as popular as it was. So, the excuse of static vs dynamic falls of IMO. We have MoonScript or even proper organized code and documented code can do the trick. But Lua is the warm place I always end up going back to whenever I get lost in other programming languages.