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Misc

Editor Extensions

There are a bunch of ways you can improve the experience of scripting in Core. If you are happy with the in-built editor, feel free to skip this section.

If you want Core to use an external editor by default when you open a script file, press ESC to open up the options, then go to "Settings" and then change the path for "External Script Editor" to the one you prefer.

External editors

There are of course several good editors out there for Lua development, but we suggest one of the following since they have tons of good plugins available.

Name Details Core Autocomplete Price
Visual Studio Code Popular powerful editor with many plugins Supported Free
Atom Middle-range power/speed editor with plugin support Supported Free
SublimeText Lightweight text editor with plugins Not Supported Free Evaluation / Paid
Notepad++ Very lightweight text editor Not Supported Free

Plugins / Extensions

For Visual Studio Code and Atom, we have collected a few extensions that make developing in Core and Lua easier:

Visual Studio Code

Plugin Name Details
VSCode-Lua Adds Lua support
Lua Language Server or Lua Coder Assist Auto Completion and more

Atom

Plugin Name Details
language-lua Adds Lua support
autocomplete-lua Adds Lua autocomplete
Linter Adds linting support
Linter UI Adds a UI to Linter
Linter: Luacheck Adds Lua support to Linter

Autocomplete

While we do not provide our own editor extensions, we supply an API JSON dump that can be used to create one. We do provide autocompletion files with all Core API for VS Code, Atom and every other editor that supports .luacompleterc though.

Atom

  • Download: luacompleterc.zip
  • Install: Extract the .luacompleterc file to your Documents\My Games\Core\Saved\Maps folder.

Visual Studio Code

  • Download: luacompleterc.zip
  • Install: Extract the .luacompleterc file to your Documents\My Games\Core\Saved\Maps folder.

You need to add the folder containing .luacompleterc to the library settings of the Lua Language Server extension. To do this, open up the VS Code settings via CTRL + SHIFT + P, type "Open Settings (JSON)" and hit enter.

Now add the following to the end:

"Lua.workspace.library": { "C:\\Users\\YOURUSERNAME\\Documents\\My Games\\Core\\Saved\\Maps": true },
"Lua.diagnostics.enable": false,

We are setting Lua diagnostics to false since we are going to use the Luacheck integration that comes with VSCode-Lua.

You need to open your project in VS Code directly, not via double-clicking the script file in Core, otherwise autocomplete will not work.

Installing a Linter

Luacheck, which also serves as a static analyzer, is the Lua Linter to use. You can add a .luacheckrc config file to your project that tells it what to check for and it will point out any mistakes you may make. Check out their documentation for more info. A statically linked binary with all deps included is available on GitHub.

  • Download: Luacheck
  • Install: Copy luacheck.exe to a folder and add it to your PATH environment variable. (HowTo)

In addition, we provide a .luacheckrc settings file with all Core API whitelisted so they don't show up as undeclared global variables:

  • Download: luacheckrc.zip
  • Install: Extract the .luacheckrc file to your C:\\Users\YOURUSERNAME\Documents\My Games\Core\Saved\Maps folder.
Last update: May 26, 2020

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