Hey folks! First post, here.

I just started learning Lua this summer, and the use of tables has been a big hurdle to me. I seem to have the basic concept worked out, but something really weird is happening to my one project.

Long story short, I'm making a racing game that is fairly code-intensive when it comes to the graphics. It was working just fine, until the other day when I started working on a level-select feature. I changed one of the level parameters from a solo variable to a part of a table, so that I'd be able to group the various parameters into nested tables and swap them with a simple level index, but suddenly, the performance took a nose-dive. I don't mean dropped frames, I mean it slowed down to a fraction of the acceptable frame rate, seemingly down to 5 frames a second or less.

I changed that one variable back to a standalone variable, performance jumped back to normal. Changed it back to an entry in a table, and the game slogged back down to a few frames a second.

I know there's a lot I still don't know about using tables, but does anyone know of any hard limit that would abruptly cause performance to suffer this drastically? All I changed was this:

(in _init:)
stage={addr=0}
spire=1

(in _draw:)     
spr(5,64+rel_x,56-(spire*8))
for y=1,spire do
    spr(6,64+rel_x,64-(y*8))
end

Vs:

(in _init:)
stage={addr=0,spire=1}

(in _draw:)     
spr(5,64+rel_x,56-(stage.spire*8))
for y=1,stage.spire do
    spr(6,64+rel_x,64-(y*8))
end

Any help would be muchly, muchly appreciated. Thanks!

I doubt that change alone is causing troubles.
Are you sure you don’t manipulate stage.spire elsewhere in the game?
Try to print variables to make sure they have correct values.

Thanks! It turned out not to be the value of the variable, but seemed to just be the straw that broke the camel's back... I was using a very inefficient function for positioning the other characters on the field, I've disabled that function for now and now the table variables cause no problem. Still strange though, I guess I'll have to do some optimization.