Tilt - physics puzzler (r11)

[Robin]

the link will break in a day or two.

No it won't. The only broken links are from before the Attack of the Aliens, which started out as the web site being split and later being down completely, after which most posts were recovered, but attachments were not.

[Xkeeper]

I hope you don't mind if I play a bit with it -- it will be kind of fun to see what else I can do (and maybe help you out, who knows).

I'll also see if I can figure out what went wrong.

[Robin]

That code... hurts.

The real problem lies in the loop which starts on line 15 (“for line in file:lines() do ...”). You see, objectnum is always incremented (I'd rather you'd do away with it completely), even if the object_type is not "platform". Hilarity does not ensue.

Especially since (rolling drums) object_type is NEVER "platform". Because it's a table.

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		object_type[objectnum]=string.sub(currentline,1,string.find(currentline,",")-1)
		if object_type=="platform" then

Replace that if with

Code: Select all

if object_type[objectnum] == "platform" then

helps.

[giniu]

Especially since (rolling drums) object_type is NEVER "platform". Because it's a table.

hehe, look at last post on previous page But anyway, it confirms it - but anyway fixing it leads to next problem we will leave you chance to deal with

[Robin]

hehe, look at last post on previous page

Oh, sorry, I didn't see that.

[Tesselode]

Thanks guys. Anyway, errors ahoy. It would be great if you could fix this new error, and if you find any other ones, feel free to fix them too if it doesn't hurt you too much.

Seriously, what does indexing a field mean?

P.S. - The code is now commented for both my sake and everyone else's sake. Hopefully this will make it easier to tell what's supposed to be going on.

(It should also make it easier for XKeeper to play around with it.)

[kikito]

Seriously, what does indexing a field mean?

It means doing field.something or field[something_else].

EDIT: also field:something_completely_different()

[Xkeeper]

Looking through this, I'm going to try to work on it a bit and do some stuff.

My thoughts so far, though:

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	object_x={}
	object_y={}
	object_type={}

You're using arrays backwards. It would be wiser to do this:

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objects[1]['x'] = (object x)
objects[1]['y'] = (object y)
objects[1]['type'] = (etc)
objects[2]['type'] = ....

This way, you can create a new object easily by manipulating only one array, and to destroy it is easily similar (objects[id] = nil).

I'm going to clean it up a bit for you, hopefully simplifying the LoadLevel routine too for you. Stay tuned

[Robin]

Something that's better to avoid is using global variables as loop counters.

You're using arrays backwards. It would be wiser to do this:

Code: Select all

objects[1]['x'] = (object x)
objects[1]['y'] = (object y)
objects[1]['type'] = (etc)
objects[2]['type'] = ....

Almost. It's easier to type objects[1].x than objects[1]['x'], while they mean exactly the same thing.

[Xkeeper]

Something that's better to avoid is using global variables as loop counters.

I agree. Though I'm curious, and this has always bugged me about Lua; if you manage your global variables carefully (to only things that really need to be global), is there a downside to omitting local within functions/loops? Especially for temporary values that are set and only used after that point.

Almost. It's easier to type objects[1].x than objects[1]['x'], while they mean exactly the same thing.

D'oh, true. I come from PHP-land so ... yeah.