Hello! The title may confuse you, and it might make you think of terrain, but I was drafting a system to read object positions, scaling, and rotations from another game as a little tech demo. I was wondering how I could make Roblox read a system like this? I’m imagining something like:
NAME: "TEMP_OBJECT"
POSITION: blank and blank
ROTATION: something, something and something
SCALE: blah blah blah
I don’t want someone to code this entire thing for me, as I feel like this is a great learning opportunity for me! I would just want some ideas on how to do this.
Do you want to display the information of every part inside of a game?
You can use GetDescendants() to get everything inside of a workspace or game, and then print the information by retrieving the part’s properties. Something like this:
for index, item in pairs(workspace:GetDescendants()) do
if item:IsA("BasePart") then
print("NAME:", item.Name)
print("POSITION:", item.Position)
print("ROTATION", item.Orientation)
print("SCALE:", item.Size)
end
end)
I think you’re looking for an data interchange format. There are many to choose from, but Roblox natively supports Javascript Object Notation (JSON).
I’m not sure if you want to bring in data from another Roblox game or another application outright. Either way, the principle is the same. You will have to write a serializer that converts your game data into JSON, and then a deserializer to convert the JSON back into readable data.
Roblox has a built-in serializer for JSON. JSONEncode and JSONDecode are exposed through HttpService, and those two functions will convert lua tables to JSON and back again. Once you have lua tables, instantiating representative objects in Roblox should be a trivial manner.
If you want to bring in data from a separate game, then I definitely recommend using some interchange format like JSON. Almost all languages have an open-source JSON library; it’s pretty ubiquitous. The out-of-the-box support really makes a difference.