Thanks slime, I didn't know that suggestions could be posted there - cool to see the discussion is ongoing, at least.

A feature I really like in Gamemaker is the ability to draw primtive shapes defined as sets of triangles, textured with an image stretched over the triangle. The great usefulness of this lies in drawing distorted images, among other things. I realise that this would be significantly harder to implem...

Boolsheet wrote:^ is faster because math.pow involves a table lookup and a function call.

And " ^ " isn't just a reference call to math.pow? And if not, why does math.pow use a slow method, when lua is supposedly a fast language?

Ah damn, i thought it was integers only. (and that was a very silly thing to think, too, considering I was reading straight out of the manual) local num = math.pow(-1,math.random(0,1)) That should work, but probably still slower than others. Also is " ^ " allowed? And if so why should it b...

Maybe this? Least hackish, as it doesn't involve any other number than -1, but the math.pow might be slow.

Yeah, sorry mate, but unfortunately this really cannot be done without canvases (actually, maybe stencil masks might work? But if you don't support canvases, can you support those?) [actually, I have no idea how stencils work.] EDIT: Maybe one could draw all the necessary stuff way off screen using ...

I second SudoCode's suggestion, but I'd give my vote to the next incarnation, which can be used offline as well: http://www.bfxr.net/ (For reference, as3sfxr and bfxr are developed from DrPetter's sfxr , which is a bit simpler) Unfortunately, these programs can only produce "8-bit" sounds....

You probably won't see much bullet drop in a sidescroller game - considering that bullets go very fast, and unless you want to be zoomed out a heck of a lot, you won't see them travelling very far. Maybe rather have things (giant magnets?) that influence the bullets' paths more severely.

Hey yeah that does look rather good, although individual droplets are a bit too bouncy without any inter-molecular forces. I guess I should mention that using a sinusoidal gradient is probably not the best way; using a hyperbolic gradient might be better as it would give a larger range of sizes for ...

It is a very interesting way to do rooms, but why do you need to use metalines? Surely you can just draw thick lines normally - unless you require the rounded corners?
EDIT: Must say it does give a very organic look that would be great for caves.