I use the .lua extensions on all my require paths and I don't have any trouble. I believe it only expands the dots if it can't find the literal file first. (Although this may be different outside windows)

It sounds like HardonCollider would be best suited for you. It's very easy to set up and use.

Unless you have some information you can (given an object's position) use to tell which object will come next, you won't be able to sort faster than table.sort does. Using a linked list wont make things faster. If it did, you'd had invented a sorting algorithm that can sort faster than in O(n logn)...

Basically, reliance on globals make your program easier to break and more confusing to follow. They're relatively well behaved in lua but can still cause problems. Imagine somebody wanted to create a lua library and they have never heard of love2d and wanted to create, say, a voice networking librar...

If you do create shortcuts then create them like slime did. And strictly speaking, yes your example is bad form but mostly because you're putting things directly in the global scope. However if you define shortcuts locally in each file it won't pollute the global scope, it will let you keep your sho...

Sorry I guess I wasn't very clear about my problem. I'm already using layers and layers are fine enough if you aren't concerned about the draw order of individual objects within those layers. But let's say I want to base the draw order of a game object off its Y position so those with a smaller Y va...

You may want to look at my implementation which is contained in my framework . The main files you'll want to look at are World.lua (the draw, _updateLists, and _setLayers are the most important to this case), and Entity.lua . I'm having trouble seeing the big picture but the idea is to use linked l...

So I'm trying to get my game objects to draw in an order based on a draw index. Basically objects that have a lower draw index gets drawn first. So if I have two objects and object A has a draw index of 2 and object B has a draw index of 1 then object B will get drawn first and object A will get dra...

A cross platform 2d game framework powered by SDL and OpenGL with an API exposed in lua? That'll never work. Maybe if it had a rocking pastel theme.

I think the real danger is that by adding too many features code becomes hard to use and unmaintainable. Customizable code usually means giving the user room to work rather than trying to do everything for them.