My ongoing newbie questions

[essell]

Hello all,

I'm new to Love, and indeed programming in general. Just got into things last weekend as I'm wanting to learn Lua to help with future job applications etc (I'm an industry-experienced level designer).

I'm right at the start of making a basic side-scrolling shooter as my first project. It's coming along alright, but now and again I come up with these little questions that I need answers to, and I figured instead of starting threads for each of them, I'd post them all here. Here's my first question, and thanks in advance:

Q. Instead of keeping all my code in my main.lua file, what code do I use to refer to another file that I want to include (PHP style)?

[Jake]

love.filesystem.include or love.filesystem.require will do the trick.

[essell]

Yep it did - project is now neatly arranged into folders, and the code nicely categorised. Cheers

Q. How do I keep track of time in Lua?
(e.g. When player presses this button, do this, then after 2 seconds, stop)

[ljdp]

love.timer.getTime()
will return the number of seconds your computer has been on since startup.
so if wan't something to happen in two seconds your looking for
love.timer.getTime() + 2
simply store that in a variable
nextaction = love.timer.getTime() + 2
then have a if statement such as
if nextaction and love.timer.getTime() > nextaction then
do this
end

[bartbes]

Or something that a lot of us do, create a timer variable, and add dt to it every time you are in update, example:

Code: Select all

function load()
    --something
    timer = 0
    --some more
end

function update(dt)
    timer = timer + dt
    if timer >= 2 then
        --do stuff
    end
end

[essell]

That second approach looks simpler and neater to me - will try it tonight. Cheers

Q. How would I make a some title screens to click through before the game starts?
I don't currently understand how to delay all the gamey stuff from happening whilst say, displaying a picture for a title screen...

[Robin]

You can make a global variable that keeps track of the "state" of the game:

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function load()
    state = 'title'
    --load stuff here
end
-- rest of the game here

function draw()
    if state=='title' then
        -- display title
    elseif state=='game' then
        -- display game stuff
    end
end

Whenever you want to start with the game, just do state='game'. This can easily be extended to include, for example in-game menu's.

[bartbes]

The specific question was stopping game logic, which is just the same, but for the update function as well, another (similar) solution is:

Code: Select all

menu = {}
function menu:update(dt)
--my update stuff for the menu
end

function menu:draw()
--my draw stuff for the menu
end

game = {}
function game:update(dt)
--I guess, you should know the rest...

function load()
    curstate = menu
end

function update(dt)
    curstate:update(dt)
end

function draw()
    curstate:draw()
end

(possible for other callbacks as well, of course)

[essell]

I've just implemented a title screen according to Robin's suggestion - cheers Robin

Bartbes - can you briefly describe what your solution is, does, and how it works, etc.?

[bartbes]

There is a table for every part of the game, in my example they are game and menu, they have their callbacks stashed in that table.
If you want to switch (or init) you assign one of these tables (AKA states) to curstate and call the corresponding callback in the global callbacks.
If this isn't vague...