Civ5 API FAQ

This page is a part of the Lua and UI Reference.

Firaxis Hungarian notation

Firaxis used a naming convention categorized as Hungarian Notation. The prefixes provide informations regarding the type.

• s, sz and str mean a string.

Example: sName expects something like "Genghis Khan".

• b means boolean.

Example: bHide expects true or false.

• f means floating-point, a number.

Example: fScale expects a scale factor, may be 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, etc.

• i means integer, a number. Sometimes it may be one of the identifiers listed on the main page.

Example: iPlayer expects a PlayerID while iWidth expects a width in pixels (50, 200, etc).

• e means an identifier (integer) taken from a Lua enumeration.

Example: eBuilding expects a BuildingType. You could assign it with 10 or GameInfoTypes.BUILDING_SEAPORT , both are equivalent.

• p means an API object (p means pointer but pointer is a C term with no relevance in Lua).

Example: pPlayer expects a Player object.

Should you use the same notation?

Well, it's up to you, there are arguments in favor of it and some others against it.

• Pro: it's widely used in the community and your code will harmonize with the one from Firaxis.
• Pro: you always now the type of a variable by looking at its name, which is useful since ModBuddy does not inform us about the type.
• Con: it's not really necessary, most of the time a consistent naming is enough to know the type of a variable: for example playerID for a PlayerID and player for a Player.