I would suggest including sprite packs that are just common geometric symbols (circles, square, triangle, hexagon, octogon, etc.) in a variety of colors. This would be very useful for many strategy games, as well as for backdrops or other special effects.
I’m definitely feeling this now just trying to draw simple hexes, which I have no way to fill, for lack of drawing commands for filled, closed polygons.
Take a look at Bortels’ Pic library in the meantime. It’s linked from somewhere here …
@hlship good points. A strategy/board game sprite pack would be very handy (as well as playing cards and Dominos mentioned by @bee).
We’re going to have polygon drawing in. I can’t tell you exactly when but it’s a very important feature.
Looking forward to hexagons, I was going to set up something to do it myself but figured I’d wait and move onto other things.
Forget about Pic() - well, look at it if you want for reference. It does have routines for drawing polygons, both regular and irregular, filled or not. They’re not aliased, so they’re a bit ugly, and they’re farking slow. If you need faster on-the-fly, we were throwing around ideas the other day about using setContext and rect to make triangles, then compositing them together. There’s also a generic flood fill there, but again - it’s slow. But - that’s all base hackery.
The new solution-to-end-all-problems is native text rendering. Specifically, the Zapf Dingbats font, and the emoji stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapf_Dingbats
Between that and the Emoji stuff, we’re well set for icons in the original map-making sense. Especially when you consider you can pick a custom size, render to an image, tint, crop - there’s gonna be all sorts of neat things people pull out of it.
And here’s the kicker of awsomeness - I don’t think @Simeon was aware of all the goodness this adds to the situation, and he implemented it! (or I’m guessing he did - whoever did should take a bow). I totally dig tools that end up doing more than the people who made them thought they could do. 
@Ipda41001 spotted the Emoji font. I was just amazed it worked.
Where? As I asked before but got no answer, is Emoji going to be supported in your text renderer @Simeon?
Yes, there are pictures of it in the discussion thread: http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/420
I don’t know if it’s the beta or not - but I was able to insert Emojii characters in the editor! Was totally floored, but it makes sense in a nutty hindsight - it’s a side effect of TLL doing things right and using the Apple UI tools to build the editor. And they WORK in print()!
Hmm. Too bad there’s no way to grab a chunk of the screen…
@Bertels - Bot beta. Beta look really cool though. Too bad they got rid if sockets.
I mourn the passing of sockets. I still hope to see them someday (or at least some sort of “fetch this from the web” thing).
Agree. At least make it so you can make online games and contact others in the wold using Codea.
Or bluetooth
I really want to make an online turn-based space game, like VGAPlanets (yes, a DOS game, I’m old). To do that, I need to talk to a central host, post turns, and download results. Without network, I’m high and dry. There’s lots of other fun stuff to do, but… well, there you go.
SpaceWard Ho!
Or Stars!
The best part about VGAP was not the game (although that was good) - it was the off-time taunting and banter. Wheeling-dealing. Threads, pleading, bald-faced accusations. Sneaking, dealing, deal-breaking. Bluffs. It was awesome.
I love Spaceward Ho! It’s probably swallowed more hours of my life than any other game. Somewhere between that and the original Master of Orion (not MOO 2) lies perfection.