Hey,

I yesterday started experimenting with Lua to see how well it handled graphics and other game-related stuff. I wrote on the other thread about my results. Well it seems like the calculator is not fast enough to handle games where fluidity in the gameplay is an important factor (i.e. many platformers). It's not that the calculator itself is slow, it's just the way Lua has been implemented on it that makes it inefficient for such games (Edit: invalidate() is able to update the screen partially, so all that written before might be wrong). I then decided playing around with Pokémon-like games, where speed is not the most important thing. And that's basically where I'm at, at the moment. For now with what I have done it seems to be working well. This also helps me to test Lua in a "real-life situation", with title screens and everything that a game usually has, in order to see what the difficulty of making such a game is and whatnot.

Everybody loves screenshots, so I give you screenshots:



It's not much (at least Ash can move and the basic tile "engine" is done), and I'm only in the experimenting/testing phase right now. I still have to see how to actually save an eventual game (it might be possible to do something with var.store() and its friends), if it is even possible, and many other things to see if it's even worth trying to make the game.


That's it for now.

PS: Also notice the small black on the second screenshot at the bottom. By "removing" 4 pixels (which is the same width as the upper bar, so it's symmetrical and doesn't look ugly) I have a resolution of 318*208, which is a lot better (especially in a tile-based game) than normally.

that looks great Hoffa!  I heard that graphics rendering for Lua is a slow stack-based method (For NLua, at least) -- what is the framerate right now?

that looks great Hoffa!  I heard that graphics rendering for Lua is a slow stack-based method (For NLua, at least) -- what is the framerate right now?

I can't really say as there is no real animation. It's also event-based so unless I make some sort of benchmarking thing with continuous animation it'll be hard to give an accurate framerate. But I'd say about 10-15 FPS, but it can be anything really.

Great job ! It looks really great

By the way, when we documented the lua functions when we discovered them, we didn't know platform.window:invalidate() would accept arguemtns that specify *what part of the screen" you want to refresh.
This is really interesting since it can refresh the screen much faster then on the parts that change, and leave the screen as is when it doesnt need to get refreshed. Maybe  it will work better for your other experiments ?

By the way, when we documented the lua functions when we discovered them, we didn't know platform.window:invalidate() would accept arguemtns that specify *what part of the screen" you want to refresh.

Goddamn, are you serious?! That's great news! That could fix many (if not all) of the framerate issues! I have to try that out, thanks for telling me that! That will help a lot.

That's why I told you

It's there : http://wiki.inspired-lua.org/platform.window:invalidate

This is so great. Just tried it out, Ash now moves faster than light (well you get the point). Having a lot of stuff on the screen might not be an obstacle after all!

Are you planning to eventually release the source code? It would be nice for people who wants a tilemapper

Cool to hear. A good spot to upload it when completed might be the Lua sub-forum on the site and also the Nspired-Lua wiki