About

This is not intended to be a full lua tutorial. This just helps differentiate and explain the more common ways that wavewall settings are created for people who have not programmed before.

What are 'Types'?

Wavewall expects settings to be created in a specific way. If you set them wrong, nothing bad will happen: I've done my best to output useful error messages whenever something goes wrong. The error messages will look something like this:

Incorrect type for 'wavewall.generation'
  Expected: nil, table
  Got: string

Here's what it means:

• wavewall.generation is the option that was incorrectly set
• Expected: ... is a list of the acceptable ways to set it
• Got: ... informs you of what was actually provided

nil, string, and table are called "types" in programming. There's a few more types besides, but the point is that wavewall expects option declarations to look a certain way. Expected has more than one type in the list because depending on how you set the option, wavewall will behave a different way. Now let's go over what types you'll need to understand.

Types in wavewall

Nil

If an option can be nil, that means it doesn't need to be set at all. This would provide optional functionality that you may or may not want to enable.

Table

Tables are the meat and potatoes of a wavewall or tileset configuration file. Tables are kind of like containers of other types. Here's an example:

example_table = {
    this_is_a_string = "hello!",
    this_is_a_number = 5,
}

TIP

Note the commas after every line! Those are required

The table is everything inside the curly braces { and }, and it is assigned the name example_table. Tables are a lot like JSON if you're familiar with that. The names of the values (for instance, this_is_a_string) can be upper and lower case letters, and underscores. If we wanted to set this_is_a_number to nil, it would look like this - aka simply removing it:

example_table = {
    this_is_a_string = "hello!",
}

When there's a table nested inside a table, the items can be referred to with a short hand. For example:

option = {
    suboption = {
        setting = "example"
    },
    other_suboption = 5
}

To refer to setting you could say option.suboption.setting. This is also what that part means in the error message shown above.

List

A list looks a lot like a table, but there are no equals signs. It would look like this:

example_list = {
    "first_item",
    "second_item",
    "third_item"
}

That's a list of strings, but wavewall will tell you what the list should be made of. A la Expected: list of number

String

A string is some characters enclosed within quotation marks. They look like this:

all_one_string = "asd09qvw()&^FV(D*&6"

WARNING

The quotation marks are required! "1" and 1 might seem similar, but they mean very different things to wavewall

Some options expect specific strings. Something like Expected: string from ("a", "b", ...). This means what you might expect, and wavewall will tell you if you feed that option an invalid string.

Number

A whole number, like 5 or -100. In almost every case these need to be positive; wavewall will tell you, but you'll probably also be able to figure it out yourself (what's a negative width?).

INFO

If you're particularly unlucky, you might see an error like this:

Incorrect type for '...'
  Expected: number
  Got: number

Make sure that you're not using a decimal. E.g. instead of 10.5, use 10

Function

Some options can be passed a lua function to enable more powerful features. I aim for users to never need to write a function, but in case you want to use one, check the documentation for that option to see what arguments the function requires and what return types it expects.

Boolean

This refers to a value that is either true or false. It would look like this:

example_boolean = false
example_other = true

Note the lack of quotes!