External Editor

External Editor

There are two methods by which you can run code from an external Lua file:

1. add dofile('game.lua') as the first line of the built-in editor and place game.lua in the correct location:

• For Windows, the file should be in the same folder as your your executable.
• For Unix/Linux it should be in the directory from which you started the tic binary.
• For Android you need to specify the full path to your Lua file. For example, dofile('/sdcard/game.lua').

2. use tic cart.tic -code game.lua command line parameters to inject your code to the cartridge

Note: dofile() is deprecated in 0.80 development versions - you can save your game as a lua file directly if you wish to use an external editor, for example:

save mygame.lua

The saved file will include your code and, at the end, all resources saved within XML-style tags. Care should be taken to avoid manually editing this data unless this is what is required. TIC will automatically re-load any changes into its code editor.

Extensions/packages for text editors

• Visual Studio Code

  • Visual Studio Code extension for TIC-80 made by @Gi972
  • VSCode Extension for TIC-80 Pro Users made by @Trifectuh, forked from Gi972's extension above.
  • API user snippets for Visual Studio Code made by @Viza74
  • Visual Studio Code settings for TIC-80 game developers - settings, user snippets, docs. Made by @AlRado

• Sublime Text

  • Sublime Text 3 package - Syntax highlighting and auto-complete TIC-80 functions in Sublime Text. By @AlRado

• Atom

  • TIC-80 package for Atom Editor with tools to edit/run games, terminal that duplicates TIC's console output, some handy snippets and autocomplete feature for TIC's API. By @ViChyavIn