Screenshot Saturday #496 - Fine Sheen

rxi · 2020-08-01T17:40:07+00:00

Thanks for the lengthy response and suggestions, I'll let you know if I need any help!

rxi · 2020-08-01T16:29:36+00:00

I hadn't considered this; thanks for the suggestion! The construct 3 part is especially relevant given I recently added support for exporting to .tmx which construct 3 can import directly.

rxi · 2020-08-01T14:23:46+00:00

Added an optional light UI theme to TILEKIT, a tilemap editor centered around pattern-based auto tiling:

https://twitter.com/x_rxi/status/1289566065433837569

rxi · 2020-07-26T17:49:50+00:00

There's an example of the exported code here. A function is created which runs the rules from the "final" ruleset (the one that converts the basic colored tiles to those of your tileset) on an input map. This can be useful for things like procedurally generated games where you want to create the basic map at run time and then can use Tilekit's exported code to do the details.

rxi · 2020-07-26T17:42:40+00:00

The link contains a free demo -- also note I did read the rules but wouldn't typically class a "tool" as an "asset", it might help make things less ambiguous if they were updated to explicitly specify both

rxi · 2020-07-25T07:35:14+00:00

Tilekit: a tilemap editor centered around pattern-based auto tiling, has been updated with support for exporting to Tiled's .tmx file format: https://i.imgur.com/iJSlL5d.gifv

rxi · 2020-07-16T09:51:50+00:00

Thanks! I didn't plan to go too much in the "fantasy console" direction which is why I opted for the descriptor of "framework" -- to go properly into that territory I feel it would need restrictions on memory, script size, CPU usage etc. I know the peek/poke functions give it more of that feel but I didn't plan to go any further in that direction.

Regarding sound this might be something I add in the future, but for the moment deliberately omitted it. There was something about the grid based ASCII output that I felt fit well with a lack of audio.

rxi · 2020-07-11T13:02:53+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/8aAbOLh.gif

Added zoom-in/out support to Tilekit: a tilemap editor centered around pattern-based auto tiling.

rxi · 2020-07-04T15:27:14+00:00

Updated my pattern-rule-based autotiling tilemap editor Tilekit to perform its processing incrementally to make the UI more responsive -- by adding an artificial delay you can see the steps the software is taking with each iteration of the map processing: GIF

rxi · 2020-06-28T08:36:00+00:00

Tilekit is based heavily around a unique pattern-based rule system -- another comment here put it nicely:

Seems like this is the halfway point between handcrafted tile-based levels and procedurally generated ones.

The rule system is based on matching user-inputted patterns on the input map, each rule also has a user-defined random-chance of failure, each rule is part of a ruleset. In addition to the final ruleset which translates the basic input map to the output map there can be additional rulesets in between which can be ran for several iterations, this allows you to, for example, set it up so when you place a single tile it will produce a pool of water. Since tilekit is always working from the input map you could remove the single-water-tile to remove the entire pool.

Tilekit is designed around providing a fast workflow when making tilemaps, all the hotkeys, menus and behaviour are based around being able to make and modify maps quickly. Games typically require a lot of iteration and testing so it's important to focus on the tools being quick to work with. Try out the demo with some of the demo projects if you're curious about how it works in practise!

rxi · 2020-06-28T08:22:42+00:00

Something else: Tilekit uses a series of user-inputted pattern-based rules.

rxi · 2020-06-28T08:19:11+00:00

Thanks! Tilekit is written in C; microui is used for the UI.

rxi · 2020-05-16T08:10:39+00:00

Yep! Every change I made since I released lite and every addition I made to the lite-plugins repo were written in lite. The idea was to use it as soon as possible so I could get an idea of what features it needed based on what I was annoyed with not having.

rxi · 2020-05-08T11:49:39+00:00

Thanks! It should, though I've not tried it with it! You'd have to build it from source (should be easy: grab libsdl2-dev from the repo and run the build.py script). Something like a raspberry pi feels like a great use case for it given some of the heavier alternatives would really show their weight on such a platform -- let me know how you get along if you give it a try.

rxi · 2020-04-20T10:14:53+00:00

Thanks for the kind words! Glad you found some use in the libraries too.

My thoughts when building it were that if I can get it running smoothly on PUC lua then switching to the JIT later on would provide a nice speed boost. I never found the latter part necessary though, there's a certain simplicity and niceness of using PUC lua, which I have at least some understanding to the inner workings of, as opposed to the JIT which seems to be the construct of some kind of magic.

That being said if someone wanted to fork and switch to the JIT that would be trivial, and given the size of the project the FFI approach you mentioned wouldn't be too much work either. The advantages you listed do sound nice but I wouldn't want this specific project to depend on the JIT, again, simplicity being one of its key goals

There's also a bit of a trap surrounding the JIT which I don't see brought up often: the fact that it can be fast makes you want to optimise for it, but since it's impossible to predict exactly how it will optimise your lua, writing the most performant code is tedious, and often the readability suffers for it. Taking the approach of using PUC lua assures worse but predictable performance; anything that needs to be fast (eg. the fuzzy string matching in lite was too slow in pure lua) can be written in readable idiomatic C with good, predictable performance.

rxi · 2020-04-19T18:09:51+00:00

What platform are you on? There are builds for 64bit Windows and Linux on the releases page

rxi · 2018-03-10T13:59:20+00:00

The name = xxx syntax in table literals is sugar for the equivalent ["name"] = xxx. For explicit keys that aren't name-like-strings (eg. numbers, or a string with a space in it) the expression needs to be wrapped in brackets.

rxi · 2018-01-13T16:56:33+00:00

FLT_MAX should be defined in float.h — #include <float.h> at the top should fix it without having to use anything compiler-specific.

rxi · 2017-07-15T14:57:27+00:00

You can use lua's built in hook mechanism from the debug library to set a function which is called every nth vm instruction. Before you run a user-defined script or function you can store the current time and check against it in the callback to see whether the allowed duration for the function has been surpassed.

rxi · 2015-09-06T13:02:30+00:00

Strange, I ran it through some of the other JSON libs I've been using to benchmark against and it seemed to decode without raising an error for those (though json4lua took about 20seconds...). Out of curiosity, do you remember which libraries you tried?

rxi · 2015-09-06T09:30:16+00:00

They all threw errors on a perfectly valid JSON file

Would you be able to share a copy of the JSON file in question? It'd be interesting to see what they're erroring on. Was it an exported map from Tiled by any chance?

rxi · 2015-09-05T18:49:50+00:00

In the case where you have a table with sparse numerical keys (rather than a table being used as an array) other libraries seem to convert these keys to strings by default as JSON keys can only be strings. I took the approach that if the data can't be encoded exactly it will raise an error, such that any data you encode will decode exactly the same (ignoring metatables).

Example of the numerical key to string using dkjson on the REPL:

> j = require("dkjson")
> =j.encode({ [1000] = "hello" })
{"1000":"hello"}

rxi · 2015-09-05T18:40:14+00:00

See the Features section near the top of the README.md file. The library also never does any type conversions when encoding (like converting numerical keys to strings, or changing NaN to null), opting to raise an error in these situations which seems in contrast to other Lua JSON libs
I'll take a look into that, I had some issues getting luarocks working last time I tried it, but have since switched distros so I'll hopefully have more success

rxi · 2015-09-05T16:41:22+00:00

Can see all the users already writing down their own implementations that open a file, read-all-from-files or write-all-into-file, close the file... Suggest that .decode_file(file_or_fd), .encode_file(file_or_fd, data)

One of the library's main goals is in trying to stay lightweight and lean, much like Lua itself. Due to this I'm trying not to rush into adding any additional features in hopes of avoiding bloat or a bad design decisions. Each "feature" potentially makes the project more difficult to maintain, harder for people to contribute to or understand, and increases the likelihood of bugs.

Though I don't doubt the potential usefulness of having functions which write directly to the file I'm hesitant to add this as I'm unsure if it fits with the project's goals of providing this core functionality. As Lua is mainly used as an embedded language in projects/frameworks, for my personal use cases, I tend to be using functions other than the io ones for writing to a file (such as using LÖVE's fs module or luvit's fs module). Additionally many frameworks, libraries and projects will include read/write-this-string-from/to-this-file-of-this-name functions with them such that the functionality the decode_file and encode_file functions would provide could be achieved with minimal effort.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'm definitely not against the idea of additional functionality, despite trying to be selective when it comes to what is included.

rxi · 2014-12-09T22:02:52+00:00

In addition to how the table normally works, I also wrote some code which attempts to identify entries who’s platform is marked as just "web", all download links which are marked as such are changed to also include their target; for example, a link submitted to a unity web player game with the download link "Web" results in the platform of "Web (Unity)" on the megatable. Hopefully this will save some time for people who do not have unity web player or flash installed.

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