From the Forum — Issue #51

19 December 2014

From the Forum — Issue #51

Welcome to the latest installment of From the Forum. In this series, guest blogger Alex Jackson highlights outstanding threads from the Corona Forum. The goal is to bring attention to the most captivating, interesting, and thought-provoking discussions taking place in our very own backyard.

Please visit the forum to join these conversations or start your own!

1. You’ve had the answer inside of event.contact this whole time!

Creating a 2 dimensional platformer game world is a heady enterprise. Populating the stage with objects and painting them with your art assets is a powerful feeling, but maintaining a straight-forward motif should always be foremost in our thoughts. Can you swing from trees? Can you walk up stairs? Can you even jump? These are ideas that should be fleshed out before the first pixel is drawn.

One of the most important game mechanics to consider is whether level platforms will be used, and if so, will they be one-sided? For those unfamiliar with the concept, it’s as if you are jumping on the top floor of your house and, instead of hitting your head on the ceiling, you jump right on through, and land on your roof. To help accomplish this mechanic, Corona Labs has incorporated the event.contact API, which makes this possible.

Check out the original thread to get a better understanding of the event.contact logic. If you have your own method of accomplishing this, please do let us know in the forum!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/53252-how-to-have-an-object-pass-through-the-bottom-of-another-object-but-still-be-able-to-rest-on-top-of-it

2. Info within a tableView is off limits? Time to dig a tunnel!

Using the Corona SDK widgets helps us achieve some pretty cool things. Writing your own lists and figuring out a way to scroll them is available, but ideally, using the Corona Labs-provided solutions helps cut down on time and get off the ground quickly.

To that end, one developer had some questions about how to access data from within tableViews when generating them in their code. The conversation that followed brought up a very good point about data availability outside of your actual project code. Using JSON or another method of saving your data and having it persist between sessions and states makes your app or game that much more user-friendly.

Check out the original thread to see what I’m going on about. Have a question about how best to achieve data nirvana? Join the conversation in the forum!

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/53301-tableview-row-id/

3. The boon of the text field.

It’s been a busy few months for Corona Labs.  However, a new API change stands poised to quietly grab everyone’s attention.

The native.newTextField API has received some much-needed attention. The majority of developers are familiar with the problems that Corona Labs has encountered trying to replicate native behavior with this feature, and they appear to be closing in on a winning solution.

Head down to the original thread to let us know how the native.newTextField code is working. The new fixes have been built into daily builds, so get the latest one to confirm issues.

http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/53348-anyone-tried-the-new-newtextfield/

About Alex

Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Software, specializing in retro-style gaming. He has created several mobile applications, enjoys long walks on the beach, pixel art, and reading the Corona forums. Contact him by email or follow him on Twitter: @pancsoftware. Check out his new game Crosstown Smash on iOS, Android, and Amazon devices!