Codea Tutorial 14 is up. It develops an extended Ship Class to demonstrate using a mesh as the ship image, simple path finding and rudimentary collision detection. http://bit.ly/NMQ0av
We will evolve this in subsequent tutorials to build up a full version of the SpaceWar! game. Next up will be a Lua implementation of the A* path finding algorithm.
I really like where this is going! What is A*?
A* is a search algorithm for path finding. A good example I usually think of is in RTS (Starcraft) type games, when you select a unit and tell it to go somewhere else on the map. A* and other algorithms like it are used to find an efficient path from one place to another even with lots of obstacles in between. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm
Yep - what @Eric said. Handy for tower defence games as well which is one of my favourite genres. We might take a quick detour down tower defence lane to illustrate.