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Saving lua globals

Started by msamurai Jun 25, 2010 at 8:45 AM 3 replies 1.2k views

Original Post

Jun 25, 2010 at 8:45 AM

Hello

I have integrated lua with my game. Everything works fine, but I can't find any easy way to keep persistent data in the scripts, ie: data that can be stored to/retrieved from a save file.

In the worst case I could of course register some functions like Set/GetVariable(name, value) and store the variables as strings engine-side, but that would make the scripts more difficult to maintain, not to mention ugly :).

Ideally what I would like to save is the global variables of my lua context. Does anyone know how this can be done using the lua C API?

Thank you

Michael

Sneftel

296

Sneftel

Jun 25, 2010 at 8:51 AM

Global variables are stored in the global table, which can be iterated over like any other table. You can use something like this to write these values to a file, but you'll need to put in exclusions for the things you can't (and don't want to) save, like the builtin modules and functions. Alternatively, you can use Pluto, which can store a wider range of datatypes.

msamurai

Author

msamurai

Jun 25, 2010 at 9:01 AM

Thanks for the quick reply. Its very handly that all globals are in a table.

So the table's name is "global"?

Edit: I mean, would this be ok?

lua_getglobal(L, "global");

Thanks again :)

Sneftel

296

Sneftel

Jun 25, 2010 at 9:18 AM

No, the global table is not named "global". See section 3 of the lua manual for how to access the global table directly.

msamurai

Author

msamurai

Jun 26, 2010 at 11:55 AM

Thanks again. Acually it was easy :)

In case anyone else is interested, I have posted the method to my blog:

http://cdry.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/how-to-save-global-variables-using-the-lua-c-api/

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