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[Kaelan]

The thing I love about LUA is its power to create complex relationships in data very simply. Indexing a table using number, string, another table, a function!?!?!? CRAZY!

Have you tried environments like Python or Ruby? They provide the same sort of generality with a lot more expressiveness and 'batteries-included' power - Python's standard library is particularly great.

Lua does have a unique charm due to its minimalism, but if all you're after is freedom you should make sure to try out some other languages so you can pick the best tool for the job.

[reetva]

I just made a buggy (in that it doesn't record the first word you type) Madlibs-type game with Lua customization.  You type in words in the command line and it records them to a file.  You are limited to five words (I can increase it in the C# source, but it's always a set number) with the Lua scripting.  (Or, you know, not. I lost track of something in my C# source, so it turns out that the user can add as many words as he wants.)  But, goddammit, I made it, and that's what makes me happy. 

[TeaAndBiscuits]

Lua does have a unique charm due to its minimalism, but if all you're after is freedom you should make sure to try out some other languages so you can pick the best tool for the job.

I have had a little look at RUBY before but didn't get on with it. Python however is appealing, just knowing the Quake Army Knife (QUARK) is written in Python is a big vote in its favour! Like you say its standard libraries are excellent.

Oh yeah. Should probably also mention that I use LUA at work and that is where my "happy Programming" was done.

-T&B

[TheSpaceMan]

I am happy. And i am just about to implement collision feedback trough box2d in my game, then i will actually be able to handle jumping and killing stuff in a easy way.

[increpare]

hmm; in a nice spot now; started working on a widget set for opengl; should be able to transport some amount of existing widget code I have elsewhere over to it.

(I'm sort of torn between prototyping a particular game quickly on the one hand, or well on the other, to allow it to grow into a game).

[David Pittman]

I'm happy because my player weapon system is mostly done. I added a weapon melee bash last night, which meant a few underlying engine changes: a get-all-entities-within-sphere function that I can't believe I hadn't needed yet, and a slight refactoring of animation events so the weapon could get a callback at the moment of impact in the animation. Then I topped weapons off with some recoil.

Now I gotta figure out how much of this I can reuse for AI weapons. I think AI weapons won't share much or any code with player weapons, but they'll both use a common ammo class (which actually does all damage dealing and line traces to determine hits and everything).

[Wishfallen]

This thread needs more happy.

I recently worked out how to do a healthbar properly, which usually eludes me

[increpare]

finally worked out VBOs.  Hurrah.  Shaders?  Who needs em!

[Ivan]

Get a better card, stephen!!! Once you play with shaders, you're not going to regret it!

[J. Kyle Pittman]

Shaders make me happy.  In my pants. 

[increpare]

Get a better card, stephen!!! Once you play with shaders, you're not going to regret it!

I'm accepting donations...

[Will Vale]

I use shaders a lot in my day job, but it's worth bearing in mind that you can do so much with old skool tech. Just single texture + configurable blend is a good start, and the register combiners on earlier cards are pretty flexible.

Shaders do make it cleaner though, by unifying all this stuff.

[BeskarKomrk]

Spent my lunch today with a friend programming a Quadratic  Formula program into our TI-84 calculators. Now, we just input values for a, b, and c, and out pops the x-values. For a beginning programmer (extremely beginning) like me, this was a huge triumph.

[nihilocrat]

I managed to write a level loader that loads a level from a .png file for pyglet.

It's even super-modular; you feed it with a 'mapping function' whenever you want to load level data, and this function can return whatever you want to put into your map data array. For collisions, the data can map as empty, solid, bouncy, whatever. For visuals, they can map to particular tiles, or colors to use with generic tiles. In either case, you can use the exact same image.

Next step: I'm planning to pay attention to alpha data and let you draw a series of images for the same map that evaluate to map layers.

[cpets]

Spent my lunch today with a friend programming a Quadratic  Formula program into our TI-84 calculators. Now, we just input values for a, b, and c, and out pops the x-values. For a beginning programmer (extremely beginning) like me, this was a huge triumph.

Awesome! You've induced a wonderful sepia-toned flashback for me, in which I have thicker hair and am arguing with my teacher over whether I should be allowed to use programs I write myself on a test. I think my response was to spend more time writing a video poker game and less time encoding my math book. What's next for you?

[Titch]

Over the past five days or so I've discovered so many things that make programming OOP's stuff in Action Script 3.0 so much less silly. Especially using static tables inside class files to create pointer tables that are encapsulated, even if they don't pass along inheritance.

Also I wrote a bunch of small static classes like a keyboard and mouse class for doing those things Keyboard and Mouse events get a bit awkward about, or I just get tired of typing out repeatedly. I'm also about a third of the way to have some standard customisable preloaded class too  .

All this triumph is setting me up nicely for the hell of smooth scrolling bitmap data.

[BeskarKomrk]

Spent my lunch today with a friend programming a Quadratic  Formula program into our TI-84 calculators. Now, we just input values for a, b, and c, and out pops the x-values. For a beginning programmer (extremely beginning) like me, this was a huge triumph.

Awesome! You've induced a wonderful sepia-toned flashback for me, in which I have thicker hair and am arguing with my teacher over whether I should be allowed to use programs I write myself on a test. I think my response was to spend more time writing a video poker game and less time encoding my math book. What's next for you?

Well, I tried doing the same program in C++, but it was a little too advanced for me. So, my friend and I decided, mostly out of boredom, to make more programs on the calculator. Between the two of us, we have: Compound Interest, Vertical Motion, Distance
Formula, Midpoint Formula, Area of a triangle (completely pointless), and a program that will find the mean of up to 24 numbers. The last is completely pointless as well, since it takes just as long to type all the values into the program as it would just to add them together. But, I was bored in class.

Also, for a joke that nobody but me would get, a created a program that writes "Hello World!" onto the screen. That made me extremely happy.

[Farbs]

Awesome

I made a whole series of Scorched Earth style games for my graphing calculator back in the mid nineties. I still have a post-it note with the code scrawled on it. It was the only way I could back up my work

Currently I'm a happy programmer 'cos I'm about to spend a week snowboarding in Japan. Woo!

[Kaelan]

Get a better card, stephen!!! Once you play with shaders, you're not going to regret it!

I'm accepting donations...

You could always try experimenting with shaders using the reference rasterizer. It's slow, but it works well enough to play around, at least for 2D.

I think Flash 10 has a software shader implementation too, though that's not HLSL - just kinda similar.



On an unrelated note, I kept putting off trying to implement crushing damage in my platformer, because I was certain it would be difficult and annoying to get right. But it actually only took about fifteen minutes! It would have been a lot harder to implement a week or two ago, but as a result of a bunch of refactorings I made to my code, it ended up being as simple as chaining together a few different collision detection routines.

[increpare]

You could always try experimenting with shaders using the reference rasterizer. It's slow, but it works well enough to play around, at least for 2D.

yeah, but I've done shaderesque stuff in software mode with allegro before; had a lot of fun, the thought of toying around with similar stuff in opengl doesn't appeal too much as a consequence.

Also: Having some extra happy reserves, I'm going to try figure out how to get SWIG to work with lua (on windows for the moment).  I've not used swig before, and it's probably going to take all day to get something working.

edit: happy reserves depleted; going to try just using the normal api again for now.

edit: reading tables wasn't as excruciating as I had anticipated, though it took me a while to realize I couldn't use lua_pushinteger instead of lua_pushstring to access unindexed elements.  But, whatever. happiness is replenishing.  would be great to have the scripting stuff I'm working on finished by tonight.