does lua have floor and ceiling function?

thank you very much my dear Sir
could you also be of help in how to load the numbers of enemies on screen cause i havnt quite figured that out yet [import]uid: 215264 topic_id: 35900 reply_id: 142705[/import]

  1. Put all of your enemies in a displayGroup.

[code] – make the group just once, at the beginning
local enemyGroup = display.newGroup()

– whenever you make an enemy, insert it
enemyGroup:insert(myEnemy)

– anytime you want to know how many objects are in enemyGroup:
print("# of enemies:", enemyGroup.numChildren)

– or show on screen
local enemyCount = display.newText(enemyGroup.numChildren, 0, 0, native.systemFont, 18)

– the onscreen count will never change unless you update it, though, so periodically you will want to use:
enemyCount.text = enemyGroup.numChildren[/code] [import]uid: 41884 topic_id: 35900 reply_id: 142747[/import]

Thank you would you also help me by answering another question

Let’s say I have green, red and black. And I want it to be randomized each time a new enemy comes on screen. How will I perform this? [import]uid: 215264 topic_id: 35900 reply_id: 142760[/import]

If it’s just a color, then think about what you just wrote and break it down into pieces:

colors : You have 3 colors, so make a table of them.

local colors = {} colors[1] = { 0, 255, 0 } -- green (rGb) colors[2] = { 255, 0, 0 } -- red (Rgb) colors[3] = { 0, 0, 0 } -- black

random : You want to randomly pick a color. So you basically want to pick a random number between 1 and 3 (the total number of colors.) Well, #table is the total size of a table, so…

local randomColor = colors[math.random(#colors)]

The trick here is that :setFillColor doesn’t accept tables - it wants three individual numbers. So you need to “unpack” it.

myEnemy:setFillColor( unpack(randomColor) )

Breaking down what you want to do into little pieces is the very essence of coding, no matter what your programming language is. Think about those chunks and you’ll have a much easier time figuring out how to do something. [import]uid: 41884 topic_id: 35900 reply_id: 142761[/import]

Thanks but I made a mistake the green red and black are the enemy colors
What I need is a method to randomly display them coming from the top down. ( I am not using the physics engine)
I can do that part, make them come from one point and walk to another what I need to do is

From a spite sheets choose random colors to come on screen
So I got a sprite sheet with all those colors I just need a way of randomizing the colors to come on screen and also more of them as the score inceases

[import]uid: 215264 topic_id: 35900 reply_id: 142764[/import]