Lua

• Lua Background Information
  • What is Lua?
  • Where does Lua come from?
  • What does Lua stand for?
• Lua and RO
  • What's it used for?
    • The client itself
    • The Ragnarok Online Patcher
  • How do we use it?
    • Client-side gibberish
      • ASCII
      • English
    • Client-side un-gibberish
  • Misc.
  • External Links

Lua Background Information

What is Lua?

Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language.

Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description
constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is
dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual
machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage
collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid
prototyping.

Where does Lua come from?

Lua is designed, implemented, and maintained by a team at PUC-Rio, the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Lua was born and
raised in Tecgraf, the Computer Graphics Technology Group of PUC-Rio, and is
now housed at Lablua. Both Tecgraf and Lablua are laboratories of the
Department of Computer Science of PUC-Rio.

What does Lua stand for?

"Lua" (pronounced LOO-ah) means "Moon" in Portuguese. As such, it is neither
an acronym nor an abbreviation, but a noun. More specifically, "Lua" is a
name, the name of the Earth's moon and the name of the language. Like most
names, it should be written in lower case with an initial capital, that is,
"Lua". Please do not write it as "LUA", which is both ugly and confusing,
because then it becomes an acronym with different meanings for different
people. So, please, write "Lua" right!

Lua and RO

What's it used for?

The client itself

First application of Lua appeared in the client as a means of customizing the
Homunculus and Mercenary AI. Later, Gravity started to move out a lot of hard-
coded data and functionality inside the client into Lua scripts, causing X-ray
clients to become obsolete.

The Ragnarok Online Patcher

Recently, the patch and skin information of the official patcher is Lua-based
as well, stored in nine files spanning five folders.

wikipedia:Lua_(programming_language) is a free scripting language,
which can be both embedded or stand-alone.

How do we use it?

Client-side gibberish

If you're using Lua files from Gravity, chances are your files are encoded.
When you open up a .lua file, you'll notice 2 things.

ASCII

Lots and lots of ASCII characters depending on what kind of editor you use:
Notepad
[File:Accname.lub notepad.png]
Notepad++
[File:Accname.lub notepadpp.png]

English

You'll notice some English words that you may find familiar, be it headgear
names, job classes, NPC sprites etc. You can manipulate this data to directly
affect the client. The most popular reasons for editing the Lua files is to
create Custom_Items#View_IDs.2C_Having_A_Custom_Item_Without_Xray

Client-side un-gibberish

The Translation Project team have been keeping their SVN repository up to date
with the latest Lua files. They're in plain English, and readable. This makes
editing them a whole lot easier!

Lua_Project

Misc.

A number of development branches have arisen which intended to replace the
Athena Scripting Language with Lua, but as of today none have been completed.

External Links

• Official Lua Scripting Language Homepage
• Lua_Project

[:Category:Customization]