Hello everyone. Could someone please assist me?

[ccpsceo]

Hello!

My name is Richard. I have decades of programming experience, however, I am new to the Corona SDK (and am very amazed and inspired by what I’ve seen so far) and would appreciate some guidance to get my next project off on the right foot so to speak.

I have worked through the getting started tutorials, creating the balloon tap and star explorer projects using my own assets and deploying to my local mobile devices. I have also read through the guides, and skimmed through the docs on a few of the modules to see how things work.

I will require a UI-heavy scene for my game, and this is where I am not 100% sure of how to approach things.

I have hundreds of items which are categorized in primary categories, and further into sub-categories.

I need to display a paginated “inventory” of all the items for a selected primary and secondary category.

Selecting a primary category, the available sub-categories need to change, and the inventory itself needs to change to reflect the available items.

Selecting a secondary category needs to change the inventory to reflect the available items in that secondary category.

Each item in the inventory display needs to be a toggle button with an image icon on the button, when an item is selected, the corresponding information for that item needs to be displayed in the “detail” display.

I have made the following diagram to help explain visually what I wish to achieve with this platform.

I am thinking that I will need to create display groups for each of the main components, and the buttons themselves. However, how to best handle all of the changing of the  visuals for everything without probably losing performance in creating/destroying/adding/removing tons of display objects on interactions. 

Could someone spare some time to help me get moving in the right direction with this? I will be eternally grateful. I’ve approached this project with several platforms already (glares intensely at Unity, Defold, Godot, Phaser) and have always run into limitations and issues that I shouldn’t even have. (Cordova and Phonegap have gotten really bad at keeping dependencies up to date as of late…)

I am thrilled that I have had zero problems using the Corona SDK thus far, and I look forward to a long relationship with the platform if I am able to complete this game with it on schedule. (Which has a soft release deadline of October 20th 2018, and a hard-release deadline of October 29th 2018)

Thank you in advance to anyone and everyone who comes to my aid.

I’ll buy you a beer or something comparable if possible

[sporkfin]

Hi Richard,

Welcome to Corona!

I can’t quite grasp the nuances of your set up but hundreds of display objects should not be a problem.  At what rate will they be regenerating?  How many images per second?

Depending on the order of the secondary objects, their size and whether they are predictable in the order they will be displayed or not, you could think about using sprites and the image changes would simply be changes in the sprite’s frame.

[ccpsceo]

@sporkfin

Hi Richard,

Welcome to Corona!

I can’t quite grasp the nuances of your set up but hundreds of display objects should not be a problem.  At what rate will they be regenerating?  How many images per second?

Depending on the order of the secondary objects, their size and whether they are predictable in the order they will be displayed or not, you could think about using sprites and the image changes would simply be changes in the sprite’s frame.

The use case would be similar to an RPG inventory screen where you have primary categories for items like weapons, armor, consumables, materials, usable, etc… and secondary categories would be like swords, staves, bows, knives for weapons, etc…

The images would not need to change at an images per second rate. On interaction with the UI, the images displayed would need to change. When you choose a primary category, the available secondary categories of that selected primary category would be shown, and the items available in that category would need to be displayed in the inventory display.

[sporkfin]

Corona will serve you well.  You shouldn’t have to worry about performance at all for your “inventory” screen.  Use image sheets for your textures and be sure to test on different devices - especially cheaper Android devices if you plan to develop for them.

Remember to remove your display objects properly and set them to equal to nil and you should be golden.  Once you get more comfortable with Corona try playing around with transition2by Markus Ranner - that should give you some good bang for the buck on your transitions - like when your items change in the inventory.  I’ve had problems with one or two of the transitions in his library but most of then are pretty reliable and it’s a great recent addition to our community.

[sporkfin]

Hi Richard,

Welcome to Corona!

I can’t quite grasp the nuances of your set up but hundreds of display objects should not be a problem.  At what rate will they be regenerating?  How many images per second?

Depending on the order of the secondary objects, their size and whether they are predictable in the order they will be displayed or not, you could think about using sprites and the image changes would simply be changes in the sprite’s frame.

[ccpsceo]

@sporkfin

Hi Richard,

Welcome to Corona!

I can’t quite grasp the nuances of your set up but hundreds of display objects should not be a problem.  At what rate will they be regenerating?  How many images per second?

Depending on the order of the secondary objects, their size and whether they are predictable in the order they will be displayed or not, you could think about using sprites and the image changes would simply be changes in the sprite’s frame.

The use case would be similar to an RPG inventory screen where you have primary categories for items like weapons, armor, consumables, materials, usable, etc… and secondary categories would be like swords, staves, bows, knives for weapons, etc…

The images would not need to change at an images per second rate. On interaction with the UI, the images displayed would need to change. When you choose a primary category, the available secondary categories of that selected primary category would be shown, and the items available in that category would need to be displayed in the inventory display.

[sporkfin]

Corona will serve you well.  You shouldn’t have to worry about performance at all for your “inventory” screen.  Use image sheets for your textures and be sure to test on different devices - especially cheaper Android devices if you plan to develop for them.

Remember to remove your display objects properly and set them to equal to nil and you should be golden.  Once you get more comfortable with Corona try playing around with transition2by Markus Ranner - that should give you some good bang for the buck on your transitions - like when your items change in the inventory.  I’ve had problems with one or two of the transitions in his library but most of then are pretty reliable and it’s a great recent addition to our community.