Your Very First Program

Now that you have installed Gideros Studio, it would be fun to see how it works.

Let us look at the Hello World example to start with.

HELLO WORLD

The project

Create a new project, give it a name, e.g HelloWorld.

After Gideros Studio starts, right click on the Project window and select "Add New File".

Name it "main.lua" (all projects should have a main.lua file initially).

Coding for the console

The simplest way to display something is on the console. The way to achieve that is using the lua "print" statement.

We type the following code in the main.lua file:

print("Hello World")

Now click on the Player → Start Local Player menu, when the player windows comes up, you will notice the blue Play and the red Stop buttons are enabled. Click on the play button.

Look in the console output window. You will see those three lines:

main.lua is uploading
Uploading finished.
Hello World

Coding for the Device

It can be useful to have debugging statements being printed to the console. Now, let us look at how to display Hello World on the device.

Type in the following code:

-- HelloWorld.lua test script

-- Create a new text field with the text Hello World! The font
-- parameter is set to nil, so Gideros will use the default font
local myTextField = TextField.new(nil, "Hello World!")

-- Position the text field at the coordinates of 40,100
-- Without this, you won't see the text as with the default
-- font it will be placed above the visible canvas area.
myTextField:setPosition(40,100)

-- Add the text field to the stage
stage:addChild(myTextField)

Now click on Player → Start.

We have successfully created our first code and displayed Hello World! on the device.