tutorial

Using Lua with C++ in practice. Part 2. Implementing the basics

Source code for this article

Hello, this is a second part of “Using Lua with C++ in Practice” series. I recommend to read the first part to know what’s going on and why using Lua with C++ is awesome! (You’ll see it in this arcticle too, of course).

This tutorial will implement a simple ECS model which I’ll improve and use in other parts of tutorials. Note that this is not the best way to implement ECS. I’m making the most basic ECS which can be used to show the main principles of how things work in my game and how you can use them in general. This is not a tutorial about C++, so I won’t spend too much time discussing C++ parts and I’ll mostly focus on Lua/C++ interaction and binding. Let’s start!

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Using Lua with C++ in practice. Part 1. Intro to ECS and basic principles

There are many reasons to use Lua with C++. One of them is that you can put some of the logic from C++ code into scripts, so you can easily change them without the need or recompilation. You can also write some good interfaces, so the scripts are easy enough for even non-coders to write them. Lua is free, Lua is fast, Lua is used in game development quite often.

While there are plenty of good articles about using Lua with C++, I think there are not enough articles about how to use Lua in real projects.

This article is one of the many articles I plan to write. Here are some topics which my articles will cover:

  •  Entity creation and other basic stuff (you’re reading this now)
  •  How to implement entity creation
  •  Managing Lua state and cleaning up
  •  Scriptable state machines
  •  Events and callbacks

The stuff described in the articles was mostly discovered during the development of my game called Re:creation.
I don’t think the methods here are perfect, but they’re good enough, fast and work well for me. So, your feedback is welcome. Feel free to leave comments and write e-mails to me about the stuff I can do better. I’m interested in hearing about your Lua/C++ usage!

While this is a C++ article, I think you can implement most of the things mentioned here in your favourite language. I’ll use Lua C API and LuaBridge for examples, so I recommend to read the following articles if you’re not familiar with them:

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Using Lua with C++. Using Lua scripts with C++ classes.

Read the first part about LuaBridge here to see how to install it and use it for basic things.

You can find the complete source code of this article here

This part will show you how to register C++ classes in Lua, call member functions and how to apply scripts to something practical like putting object behaviour code in scripts.
I’m a game developer, so I’ve used examples related to gamedev but you can use Lua almost everywhere, so take a look even if you’re not interested in gamedev.
The code used in this article is as simple as possible while also remaining a complete example which you can run and compile.
I leave out the details which are irrelevant to focus on the main topic: scripts.

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Using Lua with C++. LuaBridge makes everything easier. Variables and functions

Why use Lua?

Using scripts with C++ is great. They provide lots of flexibility and free you from using those .txt files for your configuration files and also let you write complex functions. You can modify your scripts without recompiling. This is really important because you get distracted less often. Even a short compilation can break your concentration.
And you can even design your system that even those people who don’t know how to code can create new scripts or modify existing object behavior without modifying your source code! If you want to know more reasons of what makes Lua great read the beginning of this article.

I wrote about how you can develop your own binding library in previous chapters. But this library is very basic, it doesn’t have the power some other libraries have. It’s really hard to write your own binding because it usually involves lots of templates magic and meta-programming.

I’ve tested lots of libraries and found LuaBridge to be the most awesome. It has MIT license, doesn’t have any dependencies(like Boost which some libraries use) and it doesn’t require C++11. You don’t need to build it. Just drop LuaBridge folder in your project folder, include one header and you’re ready to go!

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Using Lua with C++(Part 3)

Part 1. Why Lua is great and why you should use it. Writing simple wrapper/binding and using Lua for configuration files

Part 2. Getting arrays and calling Lua functions from C++

Part 2.5. Template getArray function and other modifications

Part 3. Calling C++ functions and creating C++ objects

I am very excited to write about this topic because it shows how great Lua is. While Lua is great for configuration files (as I’ve shown in my previous tutorials) it’s even greater when you use it to call C++ functions and you can even create C++ objects classes and modify them with Lua (I’ll cover this in part 4)
Let’s begin.

Note: if you don’t know about how Lua stack works, I recommend you to read this chapter of great “Programming in Lua” book : http://www.lua.org/pil/24.2.html

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Z-order in top-down 2d games

This tutorial is language agnostic. It doesn’t contain implementation, because it may differ a lot between different languages or frameworks. Ideas themselves are what’s the most important, I think.

Basics

So, what is z-order?
Z-order is an ordering of overlapping 2d objects. Look at the picture:
1

Rectangle B is drawn after rectangle A. The result is rectB is drawn “above” rectA. RectB is said to have higher z-order than rectA. Really simple.
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Using Lua with C++(Part 2.5)

Part 1. Why Lua is great and why you should use it. Writing simple wrapper/binding and using Lua for configuration files

Part 2. Getting arrays and calling Lua functions from C++

Part 2.5. Template getArray function and other modifications

Part 3. Calling C++ functions and creating C++ objects

This is part 2.5 of my Lua tutorial. Why 2.5 and not 3? Well, because this tutorial doesn’t introduce any new concepts. I’ll point out some bug fixes I made and what improvements can be done. It won’t be too big.

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Using Lua with C++(Part 2)

Part 1. Why Lua is great and why you should use it. Writing simple wrapper/binding and using Lua for configuration files

Part 2. Getting arrays and calling Lua functions from C++

Part 2.5. Template getArray function and other modifications

Part 3. Calling C++ functions and creating C++ objects

And you can view source code here: https://github.com/EliasD/unnamed_lua_binder

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Using Lua with C++ (Part 1)

You can view full source code of this article here

This is VERY outdated, please refer to this version as the latest and up-to-date guide:

https://edw.is/using-lua-with-cpp/

If you want to see Lua in real world practice, check out Using Lua with C++ in practice series.

So, why use LUA?

I’ve seen game devs using different data formats. Some of them use JSON, some use XML, some use plain .txt files etc.. As for me, I use Lua for data, because:

  • It is easy to use without any additional libraries(well, except of lua libraries, of course…)
  • You can use different formulas in your files, for example: some_variable = math.sqrt(2) * 2
  • It’s extremely lightweight and fast
  • It’s under MIT license, so you can use it in any way you want. Just download it and use it
  • It’s ported almost everywhere, because it’s written in C and compiles with almost any C compiler
  • You can use tables to categorize your data which is easy to edit and read

Let’s look at example Lua file:

player = {
    pos = {
         X = 20,
         Y = 30,
    },
    filename = "res/images/player.png",
    HP = 20,
-- you can also have comments
}



With a little class(implementation is below) you can get data in this way:


LuaScript script("player.lua");
std::string filename = script.get("player.filename");
int posX = script.get("player.pos.X");



Pretty neat.


Bindings


You can find lots of bindings here.

But I wanted to write my own, so here it is.


Note: my code is not perfect, but it works. I appreciate your suggestions on how I can improve my code. E-mail me if you find some errors or just to say thanks: eliasdaler@yandex.ru




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