What is the paramater equivilant to? - lua

Question

function onTouch(part)
local human = part.Parent:findFirstChild("Humanoid")
if (human == nil) then
return
end
human.Health = human.Health - 10
end
script.Parent.Touched:connect(onTouch)
I'm new to coding in lua, and it is my first time using functions. I want to know what the "part" is equal to so that I can find out how to set up the human variable
local human = part.Parent:findFirstChild("Humanoid")
without using the "part," like what can I plug in so that works without even setting up part, because I want to do something with it in a loop:
local burnaffect = false
--local a = 0
function onTouch(part)
local human = part.Parent:findFirstChild("Humanoid")
if (human == nil and burnaffect == false) then
return
end
a = 0
burnaffect = true
end
script.Parent.Touched:connect(onTouch)
while burnaffect == true do
local part = --????
local human = part.Parent:findFirstChild("Humanoid")
human.Health = human.Health - 10
end
The code may seem confusing but I'm fairly new so I don't know what is best yet.

Answer 1

It looks like what you're trying to do is have a player "set on fire" when they touch a certain brick. The code below does exactly this, and I'll explain it line by line afterwards.
function onTouch(part)
local human = part.Parent:findFirstChild("Humanoid")
if (human == nil) then
return
end
local fire = Instance.new("Fire", part)
while (human.Health > 0) do
human.Health = human.Health - 10
wait(0.1)
end
end
script.Parent.Touched:connect(onTouch)
So, I'll start going through this.
function onTouch(part)
We need to define the function first and give it a name so that we can reference it in the Touched event later. The part parameter is the Part object that touched the script.Parent object and caused the Touched event to fire. So, ROBLOX will automatically call this function whenever something touches your script.Parent and automatically input the Part that touched it as that first parameter, part.
local human = part.Parent:findFirstChild("Humanoid")
This will get the Parent of the Part that touched the block (because if a player is touching the block, it isn't going to give us the Character, it's going to give us an Arm or a Leg in the part variable, because that's the actual Part that touched it, so we need to get that part's Parent. Then, once we have the Parent, we want to get the Humanoid object inside of the Character. Then, we put that Humanoid object inside of the human variable (if we could find one, otherwise we put nil into that human variable).
if (human == nil) then
We want to check if human is nil (which would mean we couldn't find a Humanoid object in the line before this one, which means whatever touched this isn't a real Character, so we'll want to return (which means stop running the function immediately).
local fire = Instance.new("Fire", part)
This line isn't necessary, I added it because I thought if you wanted to simulate burning, this would help. You can leave it out if you'd like. It will create a new Instance of type Fire, and places it inside of the part. That is to say, if a player's Leg touches this part, a Fire will be put inside of that leg, which will make it appear to ignite in flames.
while (human.Health > 0) do
We want to keep looping until the player dies (has a human.Health value of 0 or less) so we tell the loop to keep going while human.Health is greater than 0.
human.Health = human.Health - 10
We'll deincrement the human.Health value by 10, and then wait(0.1), which will cause the script to wait for 1/10 of a second (you can change this to a different number, but it is important to keep it as if you remove it, the loop will run extremely fast and kill the player immediately. If you want this to happen, you can remove the wait, but if you wanted to kill the player immediately, you could just set human.Health = 0 in the first place.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask! Hope this answered your question.

Answer 2

I remember when I used to use Lua for Roblox. The part is the part in the game that gets touched. You need to reference it so you can find the humanoid object it belongs to or lack of so your code can tell if it is a humanoid that touched it or not. Let me know if you have any further questions.