My ongoing newbie questions

[essell]

Some of that's getting a bit over my head to be honest Will look into it further down the line though - I'm told by my programmer mate that I should learn to use tables soon. Cheers.

Q. When there's a bug and my game won't run, I often get '<eof>' expected near 'end' as the error. What does this mean, generally?

[bartbes]

I guess it means that there is one 'end' too much in your code, so you're exiting code blocks more often than entering them. (that sounds complicated, simple is: too much 'end')

[essell]

That's what I suspected. Cheers

[ljdp]

You might already know about this but i
recommend you have good read of this
http://www.lua.org/pil/
Don't just read it too, have whatever you code in open next to it too
and type in all the examples by hand start experimenting simply with them.
It helps tremendously when learning a computer language.

[bartbes]

Never used it, I always stick with the reference manual (but then again, I already was a programmer before starting with lua, it was a small syntax switch)

[essell]

Aye a friend linked me to that too - will start dipping into it

Q. How do I take a float and convert / round it to the closest integer?

[Jake]

I don't think Lua has a round function but this will do the same

Code: Select all

function math.round(x)
  return math.floor(x+0.5)
end

[bartbes]

Yes, that works, I'll warn you math.floor isn't the most effective function in lua though, btw you forgot something like:

Code: Select all

function math.round(n, dec) --dec = decimals
    dec = 10^(dec or 0)
    return math.floor(n*dec+0.5)/dec
end

Haven't tested this, but should allow you to set how accurate it is, so, if you set dec to 1, it will give you 1 decimal.

EDIT: Robin was right.. made a typo
EDIT2: and, of course, robin was right again, it's 10^dec
EDIT3:

[Robin]

That doesn't work: firstly, s/x/n, secondly, /s/dev/dec.

EDIT: thirdly: still doesn't work.

EDIT2: this works:

Code: Select all

function math.round(n, dec) --dec = decimals
     dec = 10^(dec or 0)
     return math.floor(n*dec+0.5)/dec
 end

[bartbes]

I edited my post, thx Robin