I am a fairly old roblox player. I started recently developing a game with my bro and as always in programming a lot of stuff has been done before. Sometimes even better than what I would ever be able to do.
So I have 2 questions:
Are there any roblox libraries that are very widespread among developers of this community (e.g. I have seen in the tutorials section a library called DataStore2)? Does not matter if they are libraries for animations, datastores, guis, ai, shops, etc. To be clear I am refering to 3rd party libraries like this one that I found in the tutorials section (Roblox/DataStore2.module.lua at master · Kampfkarren/Roblox · GitHub)
Do you use any other external tools other than the common roblox scripting interface? Sometimes I find it quite cumbersome and I would like to know if all of the roblox developers use only that.
I hardly ever use external libraries, and with the require() function being given the boot alot of apis and libraries have dissapeared. I would look around in Community Resources as some pop up from time to time.
There are far too many things to list in a single post, that I use or are very helpful. As a starting point, check out #learning-resources:tutorials and #learning-resources:community-tutorials-resources for some developer-written articles that may serve to your benefit.
Happens to me to make my own libraries for a specific game, for example to replace parts of code I would do very often:
Example:
If I had to create lots of instances during the game time, I’d add in my library a function called create, that would create and put properties quickly to an object.
local newObj = Instance.new(obj);
for i,v in pairs(props) do
if newObj[i] then
newObj[i]=v
end end
return newObj
end
I do lots of small functions like this to shorten the code at the end.
I use Git for version control. I use a tool called Rojo to write my code in Visual Studio Code and have it automatically synced in to my Roblox file. You can save files as .rbxlx for XML format, I recommend doing this for Git.
Roact is an interesting project I don’t personally use at the moment but am interested in. It’s React for Roblox UI development.
Mostly my own framework, but it’s completely incompatible with other projects so I never bothered even considering making it open-source. As for the other modules, mostly Quaternion and Matrix modules, shortly just the basic mathematical stuff to make my life easier.
For most projects of small size, it should only take maybe half an hour to convert it, but I don’t think syncing your Roblox file to a Rojo project will be available until v0.5.0’s full release, which is in alpha right now.
