Is there a LUA command that detects whether you are holding a weapon or not?

For example in my WIP (paranormal investigation), most of the time you will be holding an EMF meter which is a sprite on the screen, but what i want to do is make it so that if you are holding a weapon it hides that sprite, and if you hit 0 to turn off your weapon it will show the sprite again.

Is this possible? If so how would i go about it?

Yep! I'm unfortunately at work so i cant think of the name of the commands here while at work. But there is ways to check if the player is armed or even what exact weapon he's/she's holding.

That sounds good to me. It's if they have a weapon at all i need, i don't need to know which weapon, just if they're holding a weapon, so i can set it to show the sprite image when they put their weapons away with 0.

g_PlayerGunID
Not sure if it returns 0 or nil but I believe 0 means no weapon so
if g_PlayerGunID > 0 then
edit
or
if g_PlayerGunName ~= "" then

Will check if the player has a gun in his hand or not

Great thanks smallg.

Just a quick one, would it be better to use the g_PlayerGunID variable directly, or parse it into my own variable for controlling the sprite? I know some of the globals don't like to be called directly for example the get player health one etc. is this the same? or am i safe just checking it directly?

Never noticed any issue calling the health?
Either way you're going to need to check the gunid every frame anyway so putting it into another variable is only really needed if you're checking it more than once in your script... But its still mostly preference as it only takes a tiny amount of time for it to do the check with a global anyway for simple stuff like getting a number - maybe a bit different if we're talking about things like GetPlayerDistance or things with a more complicated check involved before it can return the result.

It is good practice to do so but I'd be very surprised if it was ever going to be the reason your game was slowed down.

Sorry i meant the distance check one, no idea why i said health lol

The distance check is a function call, the player variables are global variables which get updated ever frame by the engine.

Neither need to be used every frame, every 1/10 of a second or so is sufficient.

If you have a huge script with lots of logic based on player distance it will give better performance if you set a local variable to the distance at the beginning of the script and then use that within the rest of the script.

Example: