How do we do an image atlas in lua? I have never used one before so I honestly have no idea where to start understanding it.

What is an image atlas?
If you mean "drawing parts of a texture onto different stuff" then maybe look at zwszg's hexfarm map and scroll down to
--- How the faces are UV-mapped:
There is a nice ascii drawing but its still confusing.

SDL, but bitmap fonts are kind of good to learn the "atlas thing":
http://lazyfoo.net/SDL_tutorials/lesson30/index.php

Do you have the OpenGL® SuperBible: Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference (4th Edition)? It surely has something on that. amazon says chapter 8&9 (texture mapping) from OpenGL® SuperBible: Comprehensive Tutorial and Reference (4th Edition) seem related.

http://nehe.gamedev.net/tutorial/texture_mapping/12038/

Spring multilingual - High five!

Pft, not even. I just wanted to look at image atlases and see how they work.

I want to do an image atlas for common ui elements like damage classes and other things. I remember there were some old widgets that did it but at the time I was not ready for it and several hard drives later I don't have them.

I want to say adv player list or iceui did.

Bear in mind knorke, I am seldom home right now so any of my source files or books are not readily available for me to use as reference.

zomgnoway i got tricked into writing something while you did not even open the OpenGL® SuperBible!
May I suggest getting an iPhone 4s, you can scream things into it and it answers.

Super bible is in bathroom across a lake, 1hour+ away.

Why do you get the impression that I am screaming at you? There were no caps.

from my experience making things like 2d games, you're doing stuff like pulling an image from the atlas using a pre-determined co-ordinate... so you've got your *atlas image and then an array holding the co-ords of each image you want to pull out (like... for sprite x, you would have corresponding co-ordinates xy to xy that determines the dimension and location of the image on the atlas)

this is the way chilli applies skins to the GUI, i'm sure you can pervert it to fit your needs for other UI elements! i mucked with it a bit making a skin for ZK; it's pretty straightforward

*edit for clarity as coffee slowly awakens me

good point kais, I forgot that chili uses images as an atlas!