The Storyboard Engine Lua plugin provides a slightly different execution environment when compared to normal Lua script execution.

Normally a single Lua script serves as the starting point of script execution and all other scripts would be included using the Lua require() declaration. The Storyboard Lua plugin provides a slightly different loading behaviour in that it will pre-load all of the Lua scripts contained in the scripts directory at engine initialization time. The load ordering can be controlled by using the require statement to explicitely order dependencies. Since the require mechanism is used to perform the loading, any project files that use the same names as built-in Lua modules (ie table.lua, string.lua or io.lua) will generate a load time warning indicating the potential load time resource collision.

A side effect of this early module loading and execution is that any Lua script that is located outside of function blocks will have the opportunity to run before the application is fully initialized. This can be used to seed early execution environments or load preferences before the UI is in place and ready to render. Alternatively, this early initialization is possible by binding a callback to the gre.init event.

In addition to loading all of the script files in the scripts directory, the Lua plugin modifies the package.path variable and ;; default search path to automatically search the scripts directory.

A convenience variable, gre.SCRIPT_ROOT is pushed into the execution environment that contains the path from the current working directory to the scripts directory. This variable can be used to locate additional resource files or to include extra script directories in a manner that is relative to the overall deployment bundle.

print("Script base directory: " .. tostring(gre.SCRIPT_ROOT))
-- Look for additional module files in the scripts/modules directory
package.path = package.path .. ";" .. gre.SCRIPT_ROOT .. "/modules/?.lua"