learning to code

can someone please post an example of a for in pairs loop that edits customParamiters in unit defs... i have spent weeks reading lua tutorials and searching in the games code for examples and i have tried hundreds of things.

and if you will not help me then delete my account so i can never return

or dammit atleast tell me why i suck so bad at code... and i expect a few down votes while im at it..

i want so bad to mod this game but i spend more time trying to figure out how then actually getting the mods done

for name, ud in pairs(UnitDefs) do
if ud.customParams then
for wd in pairs(ud.customParams) do
if wd.pylonrange then
wd.pylonrange = wd.pylonrange * 4
end
end
end
end

.... im really on the edge man.. i think maybe i might take up drinking

ill wait till the alcohol wears off before i look at this.. but thanks.. i cannot promise i will understand you.. but i do promise not to return to zero-k until i can edit custom params.. as to doing something less stressful i got allot of joy out of the example of how to edit unit defs on the games wiki and my stress in life decreased.. but sadly no example exist of how to edit custom defs so when my modifications had bugs i couldnt fix them.. and then people asked my why things were broken so i tried to fix the mods as best i could.. maybe your right.. sigh

[screams in debugger]

The solution here is:
for i = 1, #UnitDefs do
local customParams = UnitDefs[i].customParams
if customParams.pylonrange then customParams.pylonrange = tostring(tonumber(customParams.pylonrange) * 4) end
end


UnitDefs is an ordered table so you can use a for i = 1, #table iterator instead. One hang up you may have when analyzing this code is that lua tables are pointers to tables in memory (or.. something like that) so as long as the table exists, referencing it will alter the original table instead of the copy of the table. Mostly the "local customParams" here is done for readability, though it can have some speed up properties. The second part of this is this weird if-then statement here. What this is saying is "if this variable is not nil (not set) then do this". The only time pylonrange will not be nil is if it is used for range of the pylon, which is exactly what you're trying to alter.

I suggest joining #modding and asking questions there or dming me. And please, do not post requests for help containing things like

quote: and if you will not help me then delete my account so i can never return

This is just bad behavior and I do not want to see these kinds of things as I think they reflect poorly on us as a community. I get coding is frustrating, but you need to hold your composure and approach coding like it's a puzzle. You ever play something like Factorio or the Zacktronics games? Something like that. I'm willing to tutor if you want it or I can stream some of my dev work I do around here.

thanks.. for the help.. sorry i think maybe i was getting a bit hysterical.. the community is not bad.. i was wrong to feel as-though nobody cared..

i think coding has made me confused and angry.. i dont feel like i have been myself lately.

im going to start back at the beginnings of learning lua and try to get a better base understanding

but in the meantime atleast even if i dont fully understand it i can use the code you wrote to implement some fixes to my mods

i plan to make many new mods.. that is after i take a few days off too cool down and reset

When I took a high school programming class, the way the class worked was that we would literally transcribe code from a textbook into a compiler. More often than not, the verbatim code never worked. Regardless, the goal was to make a program that could run, so were effectively forced to understand what the code was doing so that we could correct the typos and logic bugs. Weirdly, my classmates and I would were successful at picking up the language despite just transcribing. Not sure if that was the goal, but it was nonetheless a very, very useful learning method whose effectiveness surprises me to this day.

In other words: Griping about their code will get you nowhere. But fixing their code gives you an important opportunity to learn. Take the opportunity.

Been writing code for about 20 years now and.. yeah, it's pretty tough even still. Just one of those things. For sure, syntax and similar stuff gets easier, but a lot of that overall difficulty doesn't go away. Like ZK, there's no skill ceiling. But the game wouldn't be fun if it was easy, eh? It's the same thing.

Try to find ways to make your life easier while you're writing code -- if that means writing some program to automate installation, etc, then go for it! A lot of that difficulty you feel comes from trying to figure out many things at once. So working on reducing how much stuff is going on in your head can go a very long way. Maybe that's a pen and paper, or maybe just try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

You already seem persistent in getting farther, so -- keep trying! You'll get there.

my current this doesnt work list:

quote: for i = 1, #UnitDefs do local customParams = UnitDefs[i].customParams if customParams and customParams.pylonrange then customParams.pylonrange = customParams.pylonrange * 4 end end

quote: for name, ud in pairs(UnitDefs) do if ud.customParams then for key, value in pairs(ud.customParams) do if key == "pylonrange" then ud.customParams[key] = value * 4 end end end end

quote: for name, ud in pairs(UnitDefs) do if ud.customParams and ud.customParams.pylonrange then ud.customParams.pylonrange = ud.customParams.pylonrange * 4 end end

quote: thats enough for today.. 3 weeks and hundreds of attempts.. is enough im thinking maybe i should just give up altogether the code from others mods did not work and even ai seems to think the code is valid these mods will never be made by me.. everything can everything everything is 10x smaller everything explodes based on costs

i think im asking how do I modify the field pylonrange from associative array customParams from associative array UnitDefs

my code runs no errors no effect on pylon range

im trying to modify pylonrange for all units in unitdefs where pylon range exsist by a factor of 4

well i was trying..

It is possible that the code does what you want but in order to modify "the pylon range" you must do something else as well (like zerok specific, not programming specific).

Also, in Shaman's example he did type conversions (from string to number and back). Do you know what type should pylonrange be? If you set a string "4" and the code expects the number 4, then it might not work.

For example (not saying that is the issue, just an example): if some part of the code reads pylon range field at some point at start, only once, before your code executes and you modify the value in unitDefs after, then you will not see the effect, although: the field is correct and the code is correct.