Tag Archives: Lua

Some tries with LÖVE game engine in Lua

* Ce billet est également disponible en français.

Drawn with Pencil2D and MyPaint, animated using meshes in LÖVE (Lua language), I also made some tests in C with libSDL, but it is probably faster to prototype in Lua with LÖVE, and then add FFI libs for compute intensive part (in these cases light computations, GL is used for rendering), or port it to c+SDL at second time, when algorithms are validated. All used software are 100% FOSS used on a GNU/Linux system.

This one use simply a mesh on a picture, and deform them using circular motions, as I done in TIC-80 in July 2021. You can get all the sources and pictures and the whole LÖVE thing packaged: https://framagit.org/popolon/reforest

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Playing with button and LEDs on RISC-V based ESP32-C3 NodeMCU board with ESP-IDF (FreeRTOS)

* Ce billet est également disponible en français.

Table of Content

* Introduction
* Hardware: The Circuit
** Components
** Breadboard
** Choose GPIO ports and their board pins
** LED part
** Resistors
** Switch button part
* The Software
** Initialisation
** Main loop
** ISR (Interrupt Service Routine)
** Debouncing
*** ESP timer

↑ Introduction

Update: I wrote this article, following this other one that teach the usage of a potentiometer and an OLED screen..

After ArchLinux upgrade from python 3.9 to 3.10, tools need to be reinstalled by:

cd ~/esp/esp-idf
git pull
git submodule update --init --recursive
./install.sh esp32c3

If you never used ESP-IDF, you can read the previous introduction article to ESP-IDF on RISC-V based ESP32-C3, how to install it and start environment for compiling and flashing code. I also wrote article about using ESP32-C3 with Apache NuttX POSIX OS, but it will be useless here.

This article is about, on ESP32 (more specifically a less than 3.5€ ESP32-C3 based NodeMCU board, but it should work about the same way on other ESP based boards) :
* How to blink an external LED using GPIO, including how to know LED needed voltage (V), amperage (A), and compute needed resistor, by using several possible means.
* Explanations about resistors values colours bands and computation of parallel mounted resistors. I also give link to free and open source software I wrote to help to compute needed resistors (depending on LED type, and desired intensity).
* How to connect an external switch to GPIO, and which resistor is needed. How to receive and manage it’s state a good way. By debouncing physical human pressure on switch, and use software interruption (that’s more easy that it could sounds).
* How to blink included RGB LED and stop/start it by using switch, an asynchronous way.

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Lua, TIC-80, LÖVE,etc: Introduction to particles systems and games

Version en français ici

A good language for easily developing games, interactive content and procedural art is Lua scripting language. This is a simple functional language with some limited oriented object language features. It is, due to its simplicity and bytecode compiling at start by default, one of the lightest and fastest script language. Some integrations like LÖVE media/games engine and API (very powerful), and TIC-80, that is more limited fantasy-computer inspired first by PICO-8 (also use Lua). They allow quick prototyping, for a final product in the same language or a later port in another language. Lua is also used as plug-in systems language, in lot of games, and tools, including desktop applications (like Blender), web application (like MediaWiki behind Wikimedia) or embedded world. In this domain, popular and open-source drone board control BetaFlight or Open-TX open source radio-command for commands like Taranis one. There is a complete online documentation of Lua on the official website. It is possible to embbed C libs/function in Lua programs with libffi. It as been created first for Python, CFFI, and there is FFI support for PHP too now. It also possible to embed Lua scripts in C program. I also just discovered when I wrote this article (thanks to the author of TIC-80, that there is also PicoC, a simple C language interpreter that so allow to control more finely/low level data structures. The binary size is about the same than Lua interpreter.

So, after few years of looking time to time this language and tools, I started to play a bit more in end of 2020, and in few month I can said I made lot of progress in real-time programming. Doing and even finishing light games. I Needed to study again basic trigonometry (follow link for a simple interactive explanation), basic vector algebra and few other mathematics fun things, that I personally consider like puzzles games.

I also wrote a short making-off article on itch.io in march, 2021, during a game jam competition (instead of coding ^^). All of this motive me to write more articles tutorials about real-time/vector and procedural generation programming. I will try to write a series explaining methods I used. I will try to keep it as simple as possible to everyone, but some basic knowledge in general programming and mathematics could help a lot in this field as in life in general.

So I start with a short introduction about what I use the most in my development, arrays of elements and some randomness:
* Tables and their common basic management related to animation logic
* Creating a table
* Procedural generation of the content of a table
* A simple example for cleaning a table
* Variation and cleaning of table depending on tests
* Compacting code a bit
* Procedural generation of the content of a table
* Simple graphic particle system example

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