Wetting our hands

At the end of this guide you'll grow enough to be a modder. Just kidding, lol.

Nothing better for a start than actually starting, don't you think?

Who

cares

about

boring

theory.

I sure don't, especially while teaching people.

Let's finally take our script into the game! Go to your favorite Anomaly installation and navigate into gamedata/scripts. Don't have it? Create it. There, create a file my_ingenuous_script.script any way you want. All script files in the folder will be automatically included in the game - cool, right?

Hello, World?

Let's start by showing the player some nice message. Function news_manager.send_tip does wonders in this regard - let's use it! Here is a text for the script:

my_ingenuous_script.script

function on_game_start()
    RegisterScriptCallback("actor_on_first_update", actor_on_first_update)
end

function actor_on_first_update()
    news_manager.send_tip(db.actor, "Your mum gay", nil, nil, 30000)
end

By loading your favorite saved game you will now be shown the state of affairs in the world. You don't see the message? Welp, idk, try again, works on my end.

Let's see how it works:

  1. Function on_game_start is always called after loading all the scripts in scripts folder. That happens really early in the loading screen, and the game is not initialised at this point, so we need another time to show the message.
  2. Callback actor_on_first_update is fired exactly once after the game is loaded. This is the point in time where the game shows you the "Press any key to continue" in the loading screen, but game session already started, so it's fine.
  3. Now we actually send the message in function actor_on_first_update. db.actor is player, 30000 is for how long the message will be shows, everything else is irrelevant.

A little cheating incident

Just showing stuff is no fun, we need Game Mechanics, of course. Lets give player a RPG-8 every time you press "O". Delete everything in your script and write this:

my_ingenuous_script.script

function on_game_start()
    RegisterScriptCallback("on_key_press", on_key_press)
end

function on_key_press(key)
    if key == DIK_keys.DIK_O then 
        alife_create_item("underwear", alife():object(0))
    end
end

Try it out.

Your mighty soaked underwear RPG-8 is waiting for you, you dirty cheater.

You should already know how it goes. Here are the important stuff:

  1. Callback on_key_press gives you a key from DIK_keys table. DIK_keys is imported from engine, check lua_help.script for other keys.
  2. 0 is the id of actor. alife():object(0) gives you the server object of actor.
  3. alife_create_item creates an item inside the inventory of a given server object.

Easy? Easy.

gg go next