I am a new user and I installed lua and opened solar for the first time, made a new project and there was no code, just a massive phone and a console with no code. I searched for hours so this is kinda my last resort.
That’s actually good, this is what should happen!
When you use solar2D then you are most probably willing to create a game or app for a mobile phone
And any programming language requires certain files for any program in general.
so instead of you having to create those folders and files, solar2d will create them on your behalf, and it will open the folder it created for you, and finally it will launch the simulator which is meant to test whatever code you write before porting it to a real phone … and initially the code has nothing…
Practically speaking Solar2D requires the least files …
One single file called main.lua is your only required file, and it can contain all of your code
But this is not professional, and it will give you a hard time maintaining your code, and the performance of your app will die for larger projects
all of the other files and folders that you see are required for other things which you might need to set up the dimensions of the phone you are developing for, the icon of your app, or setting it to be landscape or portrait… or if you needed to use more special features and codes from other developers called plugins, which will help you in not reinventing the wheel by using ready code to put Ads or in app purchases in your app, or use barcode scanners, or any other programming library that will make you put complicated features in your app so easily
initially you just need to understand how to write basic code in main.lua, like showing text or buttons on the screen, and making those objects respond to tap and touch events … etc.
then you can move to other things
Start from zero and never stop, I did that for a month just learning solar2D or Corona as it was called (10 years ago exactly) … and now it is one of my best and most important income resource
If you use other programming languages like .net, and create an MVC application for example, .NET will create hundreds of folders and files on your behalf, so you should be grateful for what you are getting now
Thank you! It was a bit confusing at first, this really helped clear things up. I hope from here my Solar journey will be a bit more clear, as I know Lua quite well. (also that took surprisingly short for someone to answer considering how small the community is)
For someone like me who have not done any programming/development in last 30+ years, and zero knowledge on Lua, I started my journey here, Solar2D Documentation — Developer Guides | Getting Started. I found these tutorials and many other resources, including the community here, to be extremely helpful to my journey a couple of years back. I hope you would too. I am still learning new things everyday.
Oh, welcome to the Solar2D community.