Hi from old newbie

Getting Started Tell Us About Yourself
#1

Hi,

I don’t recall posting in this thread, so …

I’m new to Corona SDK (other than a two day fling a few years ago), but have been programming for nearly 50 years.  I’m very impressed with how easy it is to develop an app with Corona.  My first app was written in a couple of hours … and I used it a few days later in a magic performance.  My second app was written over the course of two days (again, it was magic related).  My first Mac app, although relatively useless, was written in an hour (and involved graphics and sound!).

I can’t seem to find an overall philosophy statement for Corona (e.g., something like  “In Corona, everything is event driven.  Unlike, say, the Palm OS, you generally don’t see every event at the top-level.  Instead, events are sent to handlers you’ve specified… your code runs until you exit the event handler.   When not handling an event, Corona mostly sleeps, waking 30 or 60 times a second, to check for possible timer-based events to trigger”).   (Hoping that’s right :slight_smile:

My late friend, Danny Bobrow, would have been gratified to see a language using his ideas (however they’re phrased in Corona) of ALINK and CLINK (which explains why a nested local function can successfully access uplevel variables later in life).  I remember learning about them from him in 1972.

Stan Sieler

Cupertino, CA, USA

#2

Welcome to the community Stan.

Agreed, I’d love to see a tech doc outlining things like:

  • Internal Game Loop
  • Processing Order For Timer, EnterFrame, Physics, Etc.
  • Script calling order for timers and events.
  • High-Level Concepts including fact that Corona is basically event-driven
  • etc.

I also agree, Corona is super-super-super… simple to use compared to (and this may just be me) EVERY other 2D game engine/SDK I’ve tried.

#3

Roaminggamer: some of those things might be deducible via some trial & error testing (utilizing os.clock()).

I used that technique to determine that no timer events are serviced before the end of main.lua.

I suspect, but would like to see docs on, that a normal program (not explicitly using coroutines or threads) is strictly non-reentrant.

(which is good, for my purposes … I have seen too many problems on platforms where signals can come in while you’re handling a prior signal).

#4

Welcome to the community Stan.

Agreed, I’d love to see a tech doc outlining things like:

  • Internal Game Loop
  • Processing Order For Timer, EnterFrame, Physics, Etc.
  • Script calling order for timers and events.
  • High-Level Concepts including fact that Corona is basically event-driven
  • etc.

I also agree, Corona is super-super-super… simple to use compared to (and this may just be me) EVERY other 2D game engine/SDK I’ve tried.

#5

Roaminggamer: some of those things might be deducible via some trial & error testing (utilizing os.clock()).

I used that technique to determine that no timer events are serviced before the end of main.lua.

I suspect, but would like to see docs on, that a normal program (not explicitly using coroutines or threads) is strictly non-reentrant.

(which is good, for my purposes … I have seen too many problems on platforms where signals can come in while you’re handling a prior signal).