As the title says, I have inserted a new book into the Unity book list, 3D Games Monetization with Unity and Leadbolt. I do however use the word book in the loosest terms possible, as it is in electronic format only and it weighs in at a mere 37 pages.

 

That said, it also weights in at a mere 3$, so there is that…

 

I will admit, before discovering this book, I had never heard of Leadbolt. they are a mobile ad provider in the vein of adMob, but with a world more options than simple banners.

 

 

Ads can be added at the application entry point, while running and at the exit point.

 

I personally HATE ads in mobile games, and gladly pay a premium for an ad free version ( which sadly most developers do not embrace, at least not on Android ), but perhaps ads in a different format will make a difference.

 

Anyways, if you are a Unity developer and are interested in monetization, you have a new book to check out.

 

It is my intention to keep the list as comprehensive as possible, so if I have missed a title or you are the author of an upcoming title, please let me know.

General Unity, Book

 

This is a general list of the various resources, books, tutorials and forums available for learning and working with Moai and Lua.  I will keep updating it as I discover more resources.  If I made a mistake or omission, please let me know either in comments or via the Contact form.

 

Books

• Programming in Lua: Second Edition
• Beginning Lua Programming
• Lua programming gems
• Lua Reference Manual 5.1
• Game Development with Lua ( 250$ ?!?!?! )
• Game Programming with Python, Ruby and Lua

 

 

Books on Safari

 

• Beginning Lua Programming
• Game Programming with Python, Ruby and Lua
• Corona SDK Mobile Game Development beginners guide

 

 

Key websites

 

• Lua.org – The Lua programming language homepage
  • Lua 5.2 Reference Manual
  • Lua FAQ
  • Lua source code
• GetMoai.com – The Moai homepage
  • Moai forums
  • Moai documentation homepage
  • Moai SDK reference
• StackOverflow – Moai
• Rapanui – A higher level engine built on Moai
• Durazno Project – Tutorials
• Moaisnippets.info – Small Moai related code samples

General LUA, Moai

 

The following is a guide on how to download and configure IntelliJ IDEA for use with MOAI/LUA development.  It is based heavily on information found in this thread, although it goes into a great deal more detail and uses the most recent versions as of 8/22/2012.

 

First and foremost, go and download IntelliJ IDEA from this link.  Assuming you don’t want to spend money, use the Community Edition version.  I have the full version of WebStorm and sadly, it isn’t fully compatible with the following steps.  Once your download completes, run the installer.

 

Once installed, run IntelliJ.  Select the menu File->Settings:

 

On the left hand side, scroll down and locate Plugins, and highlight it:

 

On the right hand side, locate and click Browse repositories…

 

In the resulting dialog, in the top right search box enter Lua.  Then locate Lua in the results and double click:

 

A confirmation dialog should pop up, choose ‘Yes’

 

In the status bar at the bottom of the window, a download progress bar will appear, wait for it to complete.  Now click OK on the Browse repositories dialog to close it, then Apply in the Settings window.  You will be prompted:

 

Choose Restart.  Let IntelliJ restart.

 

Now head over to this thread and download the attached file moai_sdk.zip. ( Or use this direct link ).  Save that archive and extract it’s contents somewhere (permanent ).  In my case I used C:\APIs\moai-sdk\IntelliJ which is a sub-directory I created under my MOAI install folder, the actual location doesn’t really matter.

 

Now in IntelliJ IDEA, create a new Lua project.  Select File->New Project… Check ‘Create project from scratch’, then click Next:

 

 

In the bottom left under ‘Select Type’ select Lua Module, then fill in a project name and location.  Click Next:

 

Kahlua should display as Lau SDK version, click the Finish and your project will be created.

 

Now on the left hand side in the Project panel, expand External Libraries and right click Kahlua and select ‘Open Library Settings’ ( or hit F4 )

 

In the resulting Window, under the Classpath tab, click the small ‘+’ icon.

 

 

Now navigate to the directory you extracted the archive to earlier and select the directory then click OK.  It should update like this:

 

Click Apply, then OK to close the Settings window.

 

You are now setup to do LUA/MOAI development in IntelliJ, but… IT DOESN’T WORK UNTIL YOU RESTART. Alright, done yelling, just figured that point was important.  For some reason, intellisense wont start working until you restart IntelliJ, so do that now.

 

Now create a new LUA script.  Right click your project in the Project panel, select New->Lua Script:

 

 

Call it main.lua and click OK:

 

 

Now if you start typing, autocomplete will work:

 

 

And Presto!  Don’t worry, all of that work takes perhaps two or three minutes, it just looks like a ton of work because of the level of detail I went into.  Now onto…

 

 

Configuring IntelliJ IDEA to run you Moai game

 

Ok, so this part is completely optional, but will make it easier for you to run a game directly from IntelliJ.  We are going to create a pair of External Tools.  Again, it will look harder than it is.

 

In IntelliJ, select File->Settings:

 

On the left hand side, scroll down and locate External Tools and select it:

 

On the right hand side, locate the + icon and click it:

 

In the Edit Tool dialog, name it Run Moai, in the group Moai, set the Program: value to point to where you’re MOAI host is, in my case c:\Apis\moai-sdk\bin\win32\moai.exe for parameters set it to $FileName$, which is a macro for the current selected files name; then set Working Directory to $FileDir$, which will expand to the current files directory.  Now click OK.

 

 

Click Apply and OK on the External Tools window to close it.

 

Now you need some code to run.  If you don’t have any code to enter in Main.lau, use the following bare bones application for testing purposes.

MOAISim.openWindow ( "test", 320, 480 )

viewport = MOAIViewport.new ()
viewport:setSize ( 320, 480 )
viewport:setScale ( 320, -480 )
viewport:setOffset ( -1, 1 )

layer = MOAILayer2D.new ()
layer:setViewport ( viewport )
MOAISim.pushRenderPass ( layer )

 

Once you’ve added that code to main.lau, save it, then in the menu select Tools->Moai->Run Moai like so:

 

 

If the menu isn’t there, something went wrong with the prior setup, make sure that you clicked Apply after editing.  After you select Run Moai, your application should appear:

 

 

Tada!

After it runs, you will see the results of the console window in IntelliJ’s Run panel, like so:

 

 

If it doesn’t, and you have an error like the following:

 

Make sure that you have your .lua file selected before you choose Run Moai.  Simply click it in the editing window before running.

 

 

 

This setup does however present a bit of a problem… MOAI logs errors out to the standard console while it is running, but IntelliJ will only display the console once running is complete.  This obviously isn’t ideal if you are trying to debug your application or if non-terminal errors are occurring, but don’t worry, there is an easy fix.

 

 

Configuring IntelliJ to run Moai in a separate console/terminal window

 

See, sometimes we want to launch a terminal window that launches our Moai host.  This process is remarkably similar with a minor tweak.

 

Once again, select File->Settings. Scroll down and select External Tools, on the right hand side select Moai then click the + icon. In the Edit Tool dialog, fill it out as follows:

 

Name it ‘Run Moai with Command Prompt’, select the Group Moai.

Under program enter cmd.exe

Under Parameters, enter ( obviously adjusting to your Moai install directory ): /c START C:\APIs\moai-sdk\bin\win32\moai.exe $FileDir$\$FileName$

Under working directory, enter: $FileDir$

 

 

 

Then click OK to close the Edit tool window, then Apply then OK to close the Settings window.

 

Now click inside moai.lua to focus it, then choose the menu Tools->Moai->Run Moai with Command Prompt:

 

 

 

And Voila:

 

Moai running, with a command prompt receiving output.  I added a print statement to the sample code to generate a bit of output.

 

 

There you go, a fully configured IDE for creating and running Moai applications in IntelliJ IDEA with auto complete.  The only downside is, the text completion is not smart enough to figure out dynamic values.  For example, it cannot handle : completions like this:

viewport = MOAIViewport.new ()
viewport:setSize ( 320, 480 )

 

It will offer auto completion on the first line, but has no idea the members in the second, so if you type viewport: you will get no recommendations.  If you know a way to fix this, please let me know!

 

Hope that guide proved useful.

Programming, General Moai, LUA, Tutorial

 

SDK is downloaded and installed.  For some bizarre reason, you need to sign up before downloading the SDK ( which… is freely available in source code form on Github… ).  Once you’ve signed up and signed in, head over to https://dashboard.moaicloud.com/download.php and download it.  Personally I am using the August developer snapshot, because apparently, I am crazy like that.  Once downloaded, unzip somewhere, I went with C:\ because I am a lazy lazy man.

 

So, this is genesis…

 

 

Pretty sparse over all.  The docs contain a handful of PDFs, but they appear to be seriously out dated.  MoaiProjectSetup.pdf is certainly worth the read though, it’s got the most technical details that still seem relevant.

 

For now, I simply care about getting a Windows host working, iOS, Mac and Android can come at a later date.  No sense adding an unnecessary layer of complexity right now.  Moai provides a sample Windows host based around GLUT, you can load the source code for Visual Studio 2010 at C:\moai-sdk\hosts\vs2010.  It has already been compiled at C:\moai-sdk\bin\win32 as Moai.exe.  To make life a bit easier, I am going to add this to my PATH environment variable.  This is completely optional, but I tend to find it makes life easier.  To append MOAI to your PATH environment, from a command run:

setx PATH “%PATH%;c:\moai-sdk\bin\win32”

Oddly enough, permanent environment variable changes do not apply to the current session, so you need to exit and start a new command prompt.  Now you can change into the directory of and run one of the samples.  Let’s try that now, open a command prompt and type:

cd \moai-sdk\samples\hello-moai

moai main.lua

 

If everything is configured correctly, you should see:

 

Well, that was easy enough, up and running a sample in about 10 minutes including download times.  Until we actually need to extend the functionality of the client, the default host should be good enough.  You may also noticed, there are .bat and .sh scripts in each example directory if you don’t want to bother setting the path to moai.exe.

 

Now to give creating a new MOAI project a shot.  Obviously Hello world seems a sensible enough place to start, in fact I believe it is the law.  Therefore we are going to create a simple application that creates a window and displays “Hello World” centered.  Create a new folder somewhere and create a file main.lua in your favorite text editor.  You need to copy a .ttf file named courier.ttf ( or rename it in the code to match ), I simply copied mine from c:\windows\fonts\. Now enter the following code:

 

MOAISim.openWindow("Hello World", 800,600)

viewport = MOAIViewport.new()
viewport:setSize( 800,600)
viewport:setScale( 800,600)

layer = MOAILayer2D.new()
layer:setViewport(viewport)

MOAISim.pushRenderPass(layer)

chars = 'DEHLORW'

font = MOAIFont.new()
font:loadFromTTF('courier.ttf',chars,120,72)


text = MOAITextBox.new()
text:setString('Hello world')
text:setFont(font)
text:setTextSize(120,72)
text:setYFlip(true)
text:setRect(-400,-300,400,300)
text:setAlignment(MOAITextBox.CENTER_JUSTIFY,MOAITextBox.CENTER_JUSTIFY)

layer:insertProp(text)

Basically we:

• create a window
• create a viewport for that window, sized at scaled to 800x600
• create a new layer and set its viewport to the viewport we just created
• tell Moai we want to render our layer
• create a series of chars represent the characters in HELLO WORLD
• create a font loading from the file courier.tff ( which I stole and renamed from c:\windows\fonts )
• created a MOAITextbox, set it’s text to ‘Hello world’ and font to our newly created font, at 120 font size and 72 DPI
• we then flip it, as for some bizarre reason, the default text is inverted, and position it in the center of the screen, relative with (0,0) repesenting the middle of the screen, so our dimensions our – 1/2 x,y to + 1/2 x,y
• finally we tell the text to draw centered vertically and horizontally within the TextBox
• Finally we add our textbox to our layer with a call to insertProp()

 

Run it and:

 

All told, a little complex for a typical Hello World application, but nothing too outrageous.  There are some oddities, like the inverted text, but as you can see, there was also a great deal of control.  Considering this is an application that will run on many platforms, all told, that wasn’t too painful of an experience, was it?

 

 

As to the SetYFlip() question, there is an answer of sorts here:

One thing to note about “setYFlip.” While all other props in Moai will automatically assume a world style coordinate, a textbox will assume a window style. To get the textbox to render with world style, you set YFlip to true.

Clear as mud?

General LUA, Moai

 

Moai is one of those projects that has been drawing my interest for a very long time.  If you have never heard of it, Moai is an open source, cross-platform game engine written in C++ but scripted using LUA.  The most obvious comparison that comes to mind is to think of Moai as a free open-sourced Corona but that wouldn’t be completely accurate, for a couple of reasons.

 

First, well, it is hard to ignore the open source aspect.  With Corona, if you don’t like what you see, tough.  Hopefully they will support what you want in a future release, but if they don’t you are pretty much SOL.  This is certainly a big deal to larger development houses with C++ resources in house.  It is also appealing to me, as if I can’t understand something from the documentation, I can jump into the source code…  speaking of which, that leads to the second point.

 

Compared to Corona, documentation is sparse to completely non-existent.  Worse still, the community is quite small and there is very little in the way of supporting documentation.  There are a few entry level samples, the documentation on this page and the class reference.  There are no books, few tutorial sites, etc…  Contrasted again against Corona there is this book, plus this and this.  As a technical writer though, this appeals to me.  The less resources that exist on the subject, the more likely people will find what I write!

 

Another big point is the target audience.  MAOI is written for experienced game developers and targeted at the same demographic.  There is no friendly installer, just a zip to extract.  You have to create a native host for each platform your game is going to run on ( although templates are provided ), and what might take one line in Corona might take ten in Moai.  Why is this?  Moai doesn’t really make decisions for you which is a double edges sword.  On the one hand, it is much more flexible ( infinitely if you include the fact it is open source ) than Corona, on the other hand, it is much more difficult.  To put things in the simplest terms possible, if you have no prior game programming experience and want to make an iPhone game, Moai is probably not right for you.  Don’t get me wrong, I am not implying you can’t make a good game with Moai if you aren’t a pro, much as I am not suggesting you can’t make a professional game with Corona, you obviously can.  Simply put, each SDK targets a different user-base, and Moai targets the group that want to get their hands dirty.  Me, I like to get my hands dirty.

 

Another big selling point for Moai is the names that have thrown their weight behind it.  It’s rather a whose who of role models. First off, is Tim Schafer of Double-Fine Games. Tim’s prior games is a collection of awesome; Psychonauts, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, Full Throttle and even the recent Costume Quest ( which if you haven’t played it, you are missing out ).  Other than making Kickstarter famous, Double Fine’s incredibly well funded upcoming adventure game is being powered by Moai.

 

Let’s just say, his is a voice that carries a lot of weight.  As does another one, who also reaped the benefits of KickStarter. That would be Harebrained Schemes.  It is possible you’ve never heard of them, as they have only released one game so far, Strikefleet Omega, a very cool RTS for iOS and Android, written of course in Moai.  The fact it is one of the more technically competent games I have played yet on Android speaks well of Moai’s capabilities.  What probably has me most excited though, is the upcoming Shadowrun Returns.  Shadowrun on the Sega Genesis is easily in my top 10 favorite games, perhaps my top 5, so this is a game I am dying to see.  More to the point, it’s the founder of Harebrained Games that really got my attention.  It’s none other than Jordan Weisman.  If there is a template for a successful game designer, this is him.  His past credits include Shadowrun, Battletech, MageKnight, Crimson Skies, Earthdawn and more.

 

So, Moai has quality published games under it’s belt, the support of heavy weights working on two games I am incredibly interested in ( in a time I am not interested in too many games! ), using a technology ( LUA ), that I have been interested in learning for a very long time ( … like, a decade ).  More so, it is young and growing.

 

I think it is pretty much a forgone conclusion I *AM* going to be playing with Moai, maybe even working on publishing a game with it, if my schedule allows.  What I want to gauge is, how many you you are interested in Moai?  If I do a series of tutorials, or probably more accurately at first while I am figuring it out, a diary of my progress/experiences, would you be interested?  For now, Moai and LUA will each get their own tag on this site and I will see where it goes from there.

General Moai, LUA