ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

TLDR: How do you actually begin programming in T-Engine 4? As in, how do you get to an environment in which you can write, save, build, and execute the code?
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Hello all!

Nice to meet you, my name is Vincent and I'm a 29-year-old Dutch guy. I am new to the community and to TOME itself, but I do have some experience with other roguelikes, and with programming relatively simple programs privately in C++ and Java, although not Lua. I decided to try T-Engine 4 after hearing on Roguelike Radio that this is also what Darren Grey uses for his games.

I realize this is the noobiest of noob questions, but I am hoping if it's something I'm struggling with, perhaps other visitors to these forums sometimes do as well, and so it might be worth having the discussion available on here. That is, if the information is not already available somewhere, but I at least was unable to find it.

So here it is: How do you actually begin programming in T-Engine 4? As in, how do you get to an environment in which you can write, save, build, and execute the code? I installed TOME (already had it on Steam as well) in hopes of finding a link to an environment to code in, but all I found was the game itself. Similarly, I installed Lua using this guide (except for 5.3.4 rather than 5.3.0), and that gives me a Lua command prompt in which I can successfully type and execute single Lua commands, but I'm not sure where and how to write a program consisting of multiple lines and how to save that somewhere.

Like I said, I'm very new at this. I love programming, but I always get very hung up on/frustrated by the logistics of how to get started, finding an environment, installing libraries, etc. I had the same issue with Java before. (I use Eclipse for that now.)

In case it matters, I'm on Windows 10, 64 bit.

Thank you very much for your assistance!

Not an expert, but you are going about this the wrong way. You don't need to install Lua or an environment, and no searching for libraries or other horrors either. Your favourite text/code editor will do.

What you actually want to do is create a new module file/folder for the T Engine to run. I believe there are baseline example modules in the game or on the website somewhere, but they might be out of date.

Right, that's what I was starting to think. So I just use Notepad++, for example, set it to Lua encoding so that I get the right highlights, and type away. And then if I make sure files are in the same folder they will generally find each other (or else I guess I just specify the path). That makes sense.

Indeed I found some example modules that are out of date but will still load in the engine if I enable cheat mode and select the option to show incompatible modules. If I look through those, hopefully I'll be able to work out how to move forward from here. Thank you.

"Incompatible modules" just checks the version numbers and doesn't know a thing about if they are compatible or not.