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Tutorial:Beginners Guide to Scripting
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Contents[show]
Introduction
Welcome! If you're new to scripting, you've come to the right place. This is a complete beginner tutorial series that will teach you the fundamentals of Roblox scripting while also teaching you how to make an edible donut and some soda. I know you want to start clicking on things and learning things, I want to take a minute to explain what you will and won't learn.
Author's Notes
Imagine there's a little dot, and that's you. If you've done any research, you'll know scripting with Roblox isn't just a one dimensional field, there's games, cutscenes, and it will seem overwhelming. Well, the good news is you don't need to know everything. 20% of the features in scripting are used 80% of the time. I'm teaching you those core concepts to feel confident learning, and I'm separating it by level for free. It's really just chapters. Following start to finish will teach you how to make it. The below is part one, and to keep it interesting you can learn how to set a player head on fire.
Level 1
Open Roblox Studio for the first time and create a Baseplate in the "New" tab, and you'll see this big area. If you don't see anything but that baseplate, don't worry, you don't have to put anything in there for now.
50% of your time is spent in the viewport. If you're modeling or moving something around, you'll do it here. Let's talk about that more.
If you go down into your Explorer panel on the side, you'll see a "Workspace" tab. Right click on that tab, and click, "Insert Part". If you have a trackpad that doesn't support right clicking, try pressing it with two fingers. But let's say you want to move that brick you created.
Go to the top of your screen, and look for "Select". To the right is "Move", and by clicking on that function you'll see some arrows if you selected your part. There are three dimensions and therefore three axis you can move your brick, the X axis, the Y axis, and the Z axis. You can move it anywhere. To the right of that tab is "Scale" and to the right is "Rotate", which use the same axis to scale or rotate respectively.
That's how you use those properties, but if you want a faster way to work, you should memorize the hotkeys or shortcuts. Press Control on your keyboard (or Command on a Mac keyboard) and holding down that key, press 1, 2, 3, or 4 to switch between them to select, move, scale, or rotate respectively. For most of your work, it's useless to memorize building hotkeys unless you're spending hours building something (which you will). And there are a lot of hotkeys in Roblox Studio. Lucky for you, Roblox has created a list of hotkeys (they call them shortcuts, but you can use either term).
Let's say you want to move your brick, but you moved it off screen. Where has it gone? How do I see it? If you use the middle mouse button, you can orbit around the brick (if you have a trackpad consult your online sources for how to use a middle mouse button. Mac trackpads do not have middle mouse buttons). But you can't get close to the brick, so you have to pan using the WASD keys on your keyboard. Familiarize yourself by moving across the "canvas". The scroll wheel is used to zoom in and out as well.
Some other shortcuts are Alt + A to anchor (meaning the part won't be affected by normal physics such as gravity and will lock in place), Ctrl (Command on Mac) + D to duplicate, Ctrl (Command on Mac) + U and G to ungroup and group respectively, Alt + Left Mouse Buttom to select within a group, and Ctrl (Command on Mac) + L and R to rotate on the X and Y axis respectively.
Let's say you don't want your part. Select it using a mouse, and use Ctrl (Command on Mac) + X to delete it. From there, you can right click on the Workspace tab and click on "Insert Object". The most common bricks and scripts are provided, and there is one called "Mesh" in the search bar. Click on it, and we can set it on fire like I promised!
Drag the mesh into a new part, and set the MeshType in "Properties" to Head (if you don't see it, go into View, and then select "Properties" from the top). With the head selected, right click and insert "Smoke" and "Fire" into the part (not the mesh). And there you go, it's on fire now!
If you're ready, you can now advance to Level 2 where you learn more stuff.
Explanation:
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