Legit question: Can you make great missions without LUA?

[fiveohmike]

Hey Guys,

 

My buddy and I are playing A10 extensively. We want to get into mission building, but have some concerns around LUA.

 

Can you make great missions without it?

 

What are the advantages of using it?

 

We are looking at making missions on our MP server but are running through the ones everyone has. We also want to make missions and open the servers up to other people.

 

I want to learn LUA on the side but for now it will be without it.

 

Thanks,

[Grimes]

Yes you can make great missions without using lua. The primary advantages of using lua is that you can create much more complex "logic" than what you can do with using triggers. Lua is way better at anything that could be automated and using any real-time data. For example if you wanted to display a message with the coordinates of a specific group. With triggers you have to figure out the coordinates and write them down as part of a message trigger. If you move the group you have to redo the coordinate part of the message. With lua doing the same thing you can use a scripting function to get the groups current position the moment the function is called. So you can move the group where-ever you want in the editor and in game without having to change a line of lua to get the desired result. Thats the sort of thing lua is great it.

[Shaman]

I think most important is to learn how to load MISC and how to run simple group re-spawn (as ME trigger actions do not feature 'group respawns'), to avoid cluttering mission with extra groups. Everything else is optional :)

[fiveohmike]

Yes you can make great missions without using lua. The primary advantages of using lua is that you can create much more complex "logic" than what you can do with using triggers. Lua is way better at anything that could be automated and using any real-time data. For example if you wanted to display a message with the coordinates of a specific group. With triggers you have to figure out the coordinates and write them down as part of a message trigger. If you move the group you have to redo the coordinate part of the message. With lua doing the same thing you can use a scripting function to get the groups current position the moment the function is called. So you can move the group where-ever you want in the editor and in game without having to change a line of lua to get the desired result. Thats the sort of thing lua is great it.

 

 

 

Thats perfect so we can still have some decent fun while learning the ME itself followed by learning LUA. I can program in Python and C decently so it should be quick to pick up LUA.

[Pikey]

Yes, frequently do both. Easier if you have multiplayer, they usually make things better. Using triggers and zones you get 75% of cool and awesome achieved.

[MasterZelgadis]

Just take an excel sheet or whatever where you enter the flags and what they do. Also it helps a lot to define "zones" of flags for specific tasks (for example 1-20 for mission gooals, 30-50 for an A-10 element, 40-50 for an enemy flight..depends on what you want to do).