Minimal lua examples are hard to find

SDK Development Discussion
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sorry about the blunt title, it's just my humble viewpoint about

as reference, I might cite amos/stos, sdlbasic, processing, nodebox, shoebot, ansi-basic manuals from 8bit computers from the 80s, etc., having plenty of minimal examples (with less than 10 lines of code, for example) covering each feature or command, that might be used like “lego bricks“ in a moer complex code - imho this can help smoothing the learning curve

(I actually have some experience coding in lua, like grafx2 scripts, tic80, etc. - só I really wonder why am I struggling on playdate lua development, and specially from the default sdk available examples (even compiling them) - I think i'm not alone here struggling… )

what do you all think about?

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It’s an interesting suggestion for sure, I remember seeing such examples on an SDK like Qt, where every feature/functionality was super detailed in the documentation on how to use, alongside examples of how to use them. The SDK documentation includes some examples but I think we rarely look at them once past the beginner stage, and they only showcase limited ways to use functionality.

If you want to throw out some ideas of features/functionality you’d like to see more documentation/examples on, let me know! I can get us started :smiley:

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thanks! years ago I made this for sdlBasic: Some ideas for sdlBasic - so the idea would be doing something like this on Playdate (lua, c, etc...) - as small stuff covering “essentials” like text, tiles, sprites, sprite sheets, tiles, tile sheets, controls, sound, etc.

this example is also interesting, a brazilian msx-basic manual plenty of small type-in examples for each command available - Linguagem Basic MSX Gradiente | PDF | Engenharia de Software | Engenharia da Computação - all can be tested on msx emulators (like webmsx.org , or better, msxpen.com , that allows you type/copy/paste code on a text field and run webmsx from there)

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Have you checked out the code samples inside the “Examples/Single File Examples” folder of the SDK? It seems close to what you are looking for.

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thanks, I didn’t notice them - they are indeed great, but the smallest one (around 30 lines of code) seems 3x larger than what I expected (10 lines of code or less), and ar less examples than what I expected as well - but they can indeed be a great start

anyway, as a minimal example, I think it’s essential you can see the whole code in a small screen size or window without having to scroll it, and it doesn't happen in most of the examples there…

(edit: these error messages are quite demotivating, are them usual? guest@macbookair:/opt/compilers/playdatesdk/bin$ ./pdc /opt/compilers/playdatesdk/Examples/SingleFileExamples/arcs.lua /opt/compilers/playdatesdk/Examples/SingleFileExamples/compiled/arcs.pdz
error: /opt/compilers/playdatesdk/Examples/SingleFileExamples/arcs.lua:1: No such file: CoreLibs/graphics - drawmode example didn’t show any error message, and isn’t opening on the simulator as well… - i’m on ubuntu gnu/linux here )

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Just double checking you have been following the initial steps for setting up a project and building it from the documentation?

The Docs are really good and have loads of code examples on how to use each feature in the SDK.
There is also Awesome-playdate that has a huge list of resources and cool things made for the playdate GitHub - sayhiben/awesome-playdate: A list of awesome resources for Playdate (https://play.date) game development and the Playdate SDK (https://play.date/dev/)
Which you can find in the Dev Links section of the SDK docs.

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