Extending MOAI Lua host with additional 3rd party libraries

[stun]

This is a brief how to which I'm posting here because it might save you 5 minutes (or me 5 minutes if I do this again). Recently I added lua 'bit ops' to the MOAI host so I could have bit flags. It was completely painless and here's a little recipe:

- First get Lua bit ops from: http://bitop.luajit.org/

- Extract it to 3rdParty/luabitop. Under 3rdParty in the moai-sdk source code you'll see a bunch of other lua extensions. We're just going to make bitop one of those.

- Add the source code to your solution or make file: Under the VS2010 solution I added a new folder: 'Libraries/luaext/luabit' and made sure it included the 'bit.c' file from the luabit source extracted above.

- Edit src/aku/AKU-luaext.h: Follow the pattern and add:

Code: Select all

1. AKU_API void    AKUExtLoadLuabit();

- Provide the trivial implementation in src/aku/AKU-luaext.cpp, again following the existing pattern you'll see:

Code: Select all

1. extern "C" {


2.         // bit.c implements this


3.         extern int luaopen_bit                          ( lua_State *L );


4. }


5.  


6. void AKUExtLoadLuabit () {


7.         lua_State* state = AKUGetLuaState ();


8.         luaopen_bit( state );


9. }

- Get the GLUTHost.cpp to call this code (search for GLUTHOST_USE_LUAEXT and you'll find the block of code that loads all the existing extensions):

Code: Select all

1. #ifdef GLUTHOST_USE_LUAEXT


2.         AKUExtLoadLuabit ();


3. #endif

- Try it out. Under MOAI Lua code the 'bit' module is automatically available so you can do things like:

Code: Select all

1. flags = bit.bor(flags, MY_FLAG)

[ibisum]

Nice work! I like the idea of bitops in MOAI by default - you going to submit a pull request on mainline moai-dev for this?

[stun]

I had considered it, but to be honest I'm a total GIT newbie so didn't want to screw anything up! I'm familiar with Mercurial so GIT can't be too hard to pick up . I'll look into it.

[sgeos]

You may want to take a look at my wiki article on the same topic.

[stun]

SGeos, nice to know I hadn't missed any steps! I can fill out the VS2010 section of your wiki article if you want since I'm using VS2010...

[todd]

Thanks for writing this!

[stun]

The luabitop changes I made to MOAI 1.3 are here:

https://github.com/c0d3monk33/moai-dev/ ... c195557322