About Lua

Lua is a simple, general-purpose scripting language. You don't have to use Lua when writing your conversations, but it does provide a very powerful method of controlling the flow of conversations, checking and changing quest states, and more.

For more information on Lua itself, see www.lua.org.

You may wish to jump straight to the Lua Examples page.

The Dialogue System uses Chat Mapper's data model. In Chat Mapper, you can control conversations by writing conditions and scripts in Lua. Information about all actors, items, locations, variables, and conversations is stored in Lua tables. The Chat Mapper manual (http://www.chatmapper.com/documentation/) has more info about Lua and specifically the tables that the Dialogue System uses, in the section titled Scripting with Lua. You can read about the Lua tables that the Dialogue System manages in the Special Lua Variables & Functions section.

An in-game Lua Console component is also available.

Where Lua is Used in the Dialogue System

You can use Lua in the following areas of the Dialogue System:

Conditions and user scripts within dialogue entries (see How to Edit Dialogue Databases)
In [lua()] tags within the text of dialogue entries (see Dialogue Markup Tags)
Lua conditions in triggers (see How to Set up Components)
Lua On Dialogue Event trigger
In your own scripts, using the Lua and/or DialogueLua classes (see How to Use Lua in Scripts)

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