Advanced text boxes and a few other suggestions...

Suggestions
1

Hello,
I’ve been looking into other Lua languages to build my app I really want to make in and found Moai. I really like all the features it has, but it’s docs are VERY unclear, it has a community that won’t answer your questions, it’s buggy, it’s slightly hard to use, and it’s just not the level of Codea. And I was looking because I needed Xcode export because TLL is not really rolling it out or giving us info on their status. Anyways, I found a few cool things in Moai’s API that would be cool in Codea. Here they are:

  1. Text boxes- What are they? Advanced text rendering. In games, as many of you know, text is the most used object and people love cool looking objects. You can do quick things like curve it, or things like change font… etc. It makes it easy to do things like you do in basic HTML text. In the string, just put something like <c = r,b,g> or font changes or stuff like that. You can curve the code in a few lines of code. You can also make it have an effect like it’s typing it out. And much more. It keeps us from putting text into an mesh, changing it, and reseting it when we change the text.
  2. Easy object transformations - Basically, you tell an object to do a transformation in a certain amount of time with the option of fade in and out.
  3. Coroutines - AKA threads
  4. Custom fonts - Self explanatory
  5. Sounds - Import sounds
  6. Location and compass sensor
  7. Particle system
  8. Game center support - I don’t expect that from Codea
  9. Easy File IO for local storage and global storage
  10. Animation API - Very simple one
  11. Things like notifications and notification badges - If Codea does turn into a real Xcode app environment, it might be nice to add some real iOS things like this.
  12. topOfKeyboard() command - Well, can you imagine that…
  13. Sockets
  14. Open source

So why don’t I just switch? Codea is the bomb. Ditto TLL. And the community. Their community shuns newcomers and only pays attention to new code. So I try and get the best out of Codea by giving them suggestions. Thanks! Please suggest adding some of these in 1.4! REALLY looking forward to the network API in 1.4 with the saving images. Some of these features would also be nice in 1.4. THANKS TLL!

2

You can use coroutines now, I just haven’t found a purpose for them.

3

Coroutines and threads are quite different beasts. You can use lua’s Coroutines for all sorts of things, starting from iterators for “for” loops to state machines or actor control in games… very potent stuff, not so easy to get your head around. I might throw together a simple example over the weekend.

4 
I might throw together a simple example over the weekend.

whenever you find the time @gunnar_z – a simple example using coroutines would be much appreciated!

5

Zoyt - thanks for mentioning Moai! If you looked at Moai during March, then you were looking at our pre-1.0 code which was a little rough and light on docs. We shipped 1.0 end of March.

I’d love to get your feedback on why you think our forums shun newcomers? Moai is definitely aimed at professional developers but we try to be open to everyone.

We love Codea too, and it would be great to figure out a way to work together.

6

@toddh - I’m sending you a PM.

7

While it isn’t full text customization, I did write a class that allows for “Terminal-like” text display.

The code can be found on my blog @ http://divby0.net/?p=339
An example video can be found on YouTube @ http://youtu.be/F0c-ObkBWfY

8

Thanks @Deamos! I’ll check it out.

9

@Blanchot, simple coroutine example

function setup()
    co = coroutine.create(foo)
end

function draw()
   coroutine.resume(co)
end

function foo()
    print("foo start")
    coroutine.yield()
    print("foo end")
end
10

@ruilov Thank you!