Player "accounts"

Garry's Mod coding
#1

Alright, so…

I have the whole concept down, but i’m a bit stumped on how to actually put it into my script.

What i want done is:

  1. The player joins the server
  2. Under the InitialSpawn function, it will look for the player’s SteamID in a table.
  3. If there is a value present (table[ply:SteamID()] != nil) it will restore other values that are specific to that player’s “account”

now this would look like this I would imagine…

[lua]
function GM:InitialSpawn( ply )

if (table[ply.SteamID()] != nil) then
         //set the player's team accordingly, give them whatever
else
        //add the player's id into the table
end

end
[/lua]

I think I saw somewhere that you can create subtables within tables? So i was wondering if it was possible to do so, so that way each steamid would be a subtable and then i could set each value within each subtable. IE who they are, what was in their inventory, what weapons they had, ect.

The other half of this script would be:

  1. The player disconnects from the server.
  2. The player’s info gets saved in the corresponding subtable.

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

#2

Hi,
putting a table in another one is no problem at all (did you take your pil? ;~):
[lua]
myTable = {“Hello World”, answer = 42, {“A table in a table?”, “Yes!”, 0100100001101001, {}}, nil}
[/lua]
Here we have three nested tables, including an empty one. As for saving the data, it won’t help to put the steam id in a table, since it’s only stored in RAM and not on disk, where you probably want it. To save it permanently, you’d want to write it in a file as plain text or via database (mySQL for instance), the first option being the far less complicated solution - generally speaking.

#3

I only took about half of my pil.

So should i use UniqueID for my table then? Can i use a single UniqueID to forever represent a single player? Thats the only thing I’m afraid of…

And also, if i’m using sub-tables (as i call them :P), how might i go about writing a value to a specific subtable with table.insert or something like it?

#4

From what the wiki says the Unique ID seems to be the way to go (the steam id of a player does not change and the unique id is derived from it; but I don’t know anything about that and might be terribly, terribly wrong, so why don’t you just try it?).

About accessing members of a table, I’d do it like this (but… see above ;~):
[lua]
– let’s pretend we use this table to manage the players on our server
users =
{
{nick = “UberJaques”, ip = “localhost”, steamid = “STEAM_0:0:1234”, uber = “very”},
{nick = “b114attwhore”, ip = “192.168.2.2”, steamid = “STEAM_0:0:1235”, uber = “nay”}
}

– now we’re going to change the uberness of UberJaques…
users[1].uber = “exceptionally”
– …add a value to b114attwhore…
users[2].lastvisit = “17/10/2009”
– …and add another user! (yay!)
users[3] = {nick = “hol11st”, ip = “192.168.2.3”, steamid = “censored”, uber = “no”}

– did it work?
for i = 1, #users do
for key, value in pairs(users*) do print(key, value) end
end
– I hope so… (output is a bit messy, though :~)

[/lua]

Output:



S:\workbench\lua	emp>lua5.1 test.lua
uber    exceptionally
nick    UberJaques
steamid STEAM_0:0:1234
ip      localhost
steamid STEAM_0:0:1235
nick    b114attwhore
uber    nay
lastvisit       17/10/2009
ip      192.168.2.2
uber    no
nick    hol11st
steamid censored
ip      192.168.2.3

This is only for (self) educational purposes and not to show how you’d actually work with user data (not that I knew anything about that :~). Read the parts about tables again and look for good tutorials if you need more info on that. And play around with the interpreter, it’s a good way to answer simple questions instead of waiting patiently for someone to help you out.

#5

UniqueID equals to util.CRC(“gm” … player:SteamID() … “gm”), from what I can remember.

#6

That was very helpful, thank you.

I just took some Nyquil (green death flavor >:O) so i’m going to crash for tonight.
I’ll start working on the script tomorrow and we’ll see what happens.

It pretty much looks like your example is all i need.

#7

Nope :l