Moon Lander, old school style

Examples
1

This was the first app I wrote as an experiment entirely using the iPad (no blue tooth keyboard either!), and my first taste of Lua.

(displayMode() doesn’t work on iPad1, so no fullscreen.)

I wrote a 7 segment display so I could show numbers on the screen for the lander.

The dots above the numbers glow green or red depending on if you are going slow enough (or are straight enough) to land. There is one larger landing pad in the center, and two smaller ones to the sides. There’s no instructions- intention is player will soon learn what the lights and buttons do.

The fuel has no light until it gets to half, then it flashes yellow, finally red.

It’s intentionally old school: of course I could have color coded the numbers themselves, but I seemed more in the spirit of the 1960’s technology to represent a plain display and a colored circular light.

Yes, you can crash into peaks sticking up out of the ground. =)

Cursor placement is a royal pain on the interface, so the code itself is a bit ugly- unrefactored, no-version-control old-school code!

BTW, to get out of the new full screen mode, triple tap three times.

Thanks for this really fun app!

http://www.thevenom.net/codea/lander/lander_flying.png

http://www.thevenom.net/codea/lander/lander_crashed.png

http://www.thevenom.net/codea/lander/lander_landed.png

2

Nice work! I remember being completely frustrated while loving these games as a kid.

3

Havent got a chance to play with it but screenshots look really cool!

4

Neat! yes, I loved lunar lander in the arcade, this looks fun (I’ll try it as soon as I can get the ipad away from my never-goes-to-sleep 3 year old).

5

I’ve added a version for the iPad1- found a few things that made it not work. Might have also been broken the first version I posted on the iPad2. So now there are two versions.

One problem I had was copying the file from the web site on the iPad. Currently, I don’t know how to get around having to email the code from a computer to the iPad. Is there a way to select-all from a .txt file displayed in Safari? Thanks!

6

@dizzysnakepilot, what if you make a Posterous account and email it from Codea to post@posterous.com ? Then we will be able to download the code.

7

I did as you suggested, but was unable to get a working version off the Posterous site. The line endings were removed, making the pasted code useless. Other ideas? Thanks,

8

@dizzysnakepilot, did you use Codea to launch the email to Posterous? Hold down the project you want to email and the button comes up from there.

9

Ah ha! That’s a lot better, and I was able to test getting the code on the iPad and running it, thanks!

http://dizzysnakepilot.posterous.com/lander-codea-ipad2-6561

10

Great, @dizzysnakepilot! My record crash was at 365 kph. You should add crash craters! :slight_smile: I remember one version that would tell you how deep it was.