If you’re reading this I am in a bit of a dilemma: In my 2 year journey of learning Lua and getting to know it inside out everytime I wanted to find something new to learn it was simple, a quick Google search, a video online or one of the many posts here yet as I have progressed through the many topics I have explored and utilized I feel like finding new functionalities and interesting quirks has become more of a witch hunt as it ever has been.
The truth is when I look online and see something interesting someone has made it is impossible to find how it is done, the search for a complex way of applying the code I already know or don’t has become extremely difficult only sometimes being found in niche corners of the forum.
TLDR:
I have been learning new things in Lua for the past two years straight and have not looked back since, applying my skill to different projects and games yet things feel like they are plateauing even though I know there is so much more to learn.
Welcome! Lua is a powerful and fast programming language that is easy to learn and use and to embed into your application.Lua is designed to be a lightweight embeddable scripting language. It is used for all sorts of applications, from games to web applications and image processing.See the about page for details and some reasons why you should choose Lua.See what Lua programs look and feel like in the live demo.LearningA good place to start learning Lua is the book Programming in Lua, available in paperback and as an e-book. The first edition is freely available online. See also course notes based on this book.The official definition of the Lua language is given in the reference manual.See the documentation page and the wiki for more.Getting helpOur community is friendly and will most probably help you if you need. Just visit the mailing list, the chat room, and stackoverflow.If you need help in Portuguese, join the Lua BR mailing list and visit pt.stackoverflow.See also the FAQ, the community-maintained wiki and LuaFaq, and the much longer uFAQ.ToolsIf you need to complement the standard Lua libraries to handle more complex tasks, the lua-users wiki lists many user-contributed addons for Lua, including tools, libraries, full distributions, and binaries for several platforms.You can find many user-contributed modules for Lua in LuaRocks. See also Awesome Lua, a curated list of quality Lua packages and resources.Try also LuaDist, a multi-platform distribution of Lua that includes batteries.SupportingYou can help to support the Lua project by buying a book published by Lua.org and by making a donation.You can also help to spread the word about Lua by buying Lua products at Zazzle.[buy at the Lua Bookstore at Amazon]InstallingUse the live demo to play with Lua if you don’t want to install anything on your computer.To run Lua programs on your computer, you’ll need a standalone Lua interpreter and perhaps some additional Lua libraries. Use your favorite text editor to write your Lua programs. Make sure to save your programs as plain text. If you want an IDE, try ZeroBrane Studio.If you use Windows, try LuaDist, a multi-platform distribution of the Lua that includes batteries.If you use Linux or Mac OS X, Lua is either already installed on your system or there is a Lua package for it. Make sure you get the latest release of Lua (currently 5.3.5).Lua is also quite easy to build from source, as explained below.Building from sourceLua is very easy to build and install. Just download it and follow the instructions in the package. Here is a simple terminal session that downloads the current release of Lua and builds it in a Linux system: curl -R -O http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.3.5.tar.gz tar zxf lua-5.3.5.tar.gz cd lua-5.3.5 make linux testFor Mac OS X, use make macosx test. If you don’t have curl, try wget.If you use Windows and want to build Lua from source, there are detailed instructions in the wiki.EmbeddingTo embed Lua into your C or C++ program, you’ll need the Lua headers to compile your program and a Lua library to link with it. If you’re getting a ready-made Lua package for your platform, you’ll probably need the development package as well. Otherwise, just download Lua and add its source directory to your project.
Well, if your problem is that you do not know how to do something, a basic search in google is the answer, do not search for “how to make a gun” and that they only give you the script without teaching how it is done, you could answer these questions before:
What I am going to do?
How am I going to do it?
What will I need?
What I am going to do? Answer: A shop in a gui.
How am I going to do it? Answer: I will do the gui, the player will click the item, place the amount and be charged.
What will I need? Answer: Objects for the gui, events that detect the interaction of the player, should the server give the item ? Oh yes, I will use a RemoteEvent
that little scheme always gets me out of my troubles, it is also not necessary to write all the code in order, express your ideas and then clean it for better reading.
That’s the beauty of it all. You said it yourself in fact, there is always more to learn. If you genuinely feel that you can’t learn more or that it’s too difficult to continue learning, then it’s time to learn other things. You can try learning vanilla lua or another programming language. As a programmer the more programming languages you know the stronger your skillset is. You could even try your hand at 3D modeling or something.
I honestly had this problem as well. I remembered, however, a moment back when I was still beginning developing. I was creating a music player that used a proxy to get a list of music id’s from the Roblox catalog. At that time I was still new to using HttpService, and this was my first project with it. I didn’t actually know how to set up a proxy however, so I had to use a tutorial for a free service that set one up for me. I didn’t understand the JavaScript code that it used at that time, even though I got it working (it was a copy and paste tutorial for setting up the proxy). I understand programming as a whole a lot better now, so I decided to start learning JavaScript so I can go back to that code and actually understand what I’m reading.
When you level off, don’t stop. Find another mountain to climb and start climbing. Expand your horizon.
P.S.
If you don’t know JavaScript either I can provide you with the website I’m using to learn it. A lot of it you will already know, just because it’s the basics of any programming language you come across. The only exception to this that I know of is TI Basic, the programming language for TI-84 calculators. That programming language sucks. However, that is just part of learning the syntax for a new language.
EDIT: Nevermind. I read your profile and it said you already know a lot about JavaScript.
Once last thing, if you truly want to become better at Lua, stop trying to mimic others. That will only ever work to an extent. Try creating something of your own for a change. Eventually you might create something that will leave others wondering how you did it.