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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 API 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-core The official extension that adds support for the Core Games API to the Lua Language Server
vscode-lua Adds Lua & Luacheck support

As of version 1.0.0, our own extension uses Sumneko's Lua Language Server with auto-generated EmmyLua annotations.

If you have previously been using vscode-core together with the "Lua Coder Assist" extension, make sure to uninstall it for the best results.

Sumneko's Lua extension also comes with it's own "Diagnostics" feature, so if you have been using other extensions that use Luacheck and a .luacheckrc file, you might want to either disable those extensions or the "Diagnostics" feature in Sumneko's.

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

For editors where we do not provide our own editor extensions, we supply a JSON dump of our API that can be used to create one. We also provide autocompletion files with all of the Core API for Atom and every other editor that supports .luacompleterc.

API Dump

.luacompleterc

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

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 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.

If you want to use vscode-core together with a Luacheck extension, you might want to disable the "Diagnostics" feature in Sumneko's Lua extension.

Last update: July 12, 2021