From the Forum — Issue #84

07 August 2015

From the Forum — Issue #84

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. Bridge the language gap

I’m excited about bringing important forum posts to the Corona masses as often as I can find them. Much like incredible amount of diversity that makes up the Corona development community, our users’ locales circle the globe. To that end, it’s obvious that targeting as many languages as possible will help you reach the widest audience.

Getting everything set up to target as many languages as can be a bit daunting, but Corona provides as many tips as possible to make the process seamless. The below thread highlights a few of them, with not one but two Corona engineers providing insight into the process. There are some important things to remember when making the detection smooth, so head down to the original thread and check out the suggestions.

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/58390-making-every-text-available-in-multiple-languages/

2. High-level shaders made easier to manage

I admit that I always make the best effort to get my OOP methods clean as a whistle, but sometimes they just get away from me! I don’t know if anyone else is in the same boat, but both new users and old run into all kinds of problems when getting their Object Oriented Programming metatables straight in their minds, me included.

One developer had some additional questions about the best way to implement OOP within Lua. This is a hotly debated subject on the interwebs, but thank goodness our resident walking Lua encyclopedia StarCrunch jumped on into the thread to lay down some logic for us plebeians. If you’re looking to start learning about metatables and metamethods in regards to getting OOP working with best practices with Lua in general, and Corona in particular, check out the original thread and get schooled on some knowledge.

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/58376-question-regarding-metatables-and-oop/

3. AutoLan is back from the dead!

Time for a little bit of shameless plugging, folks, so strap in: As we discussed on this week’s Corona Geek: After Dark, multiplayer functionality seems to be the “desert oasis” of mobile gaming. Everyone wants it in their apps, but rarely does the implementation ever meet our expectations, and normally leaves us thirsty for lower latency and less lost packets.

One of the best ways to allow multiplayer without worrying about everyone’s varied internet connections, is to allow for multiplayer gaming over a LAN. The AutoLAN library used to provide a very developer-friendly way to incorporate this feature, but alas, it fell out of support quite a while ago, and recently folks have encountered issues getting it incorporated into a project. But no longer! One good samaritan Corona developer was able to get it started by changing around a few socket calls, and decided to share it with the rest of us. So put down that eggplant parmesan and click over to the original thread!

https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/58394-got-old-auto-lan-to-work

About Alex

Alex Jackson is an indie developer and the founder of Panc Interactive, 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: @pancinteractive. Check out his new game Segreta on iOS, Android, Windows Phone and Amazon devices.