New to Lua/LOVE

[vynom]

Hello everyone!

Finally got around to posting, been reading the forums and the wiki for quite some time. Was a Gamemaker Pro(5-6) user back in 2005-2008, and got into PHP/html web development and kind of lost interest in game programming. Not too long ago, resparked the interest while reading up on some HTML canvas materials to, low-and-behold; make a game again(random, just kind of stumbled on a post after another post about it). Jump forward a few more months, and I was studying Python/Pygame due to the library being great for newbies, and I was determined to learn OOP, as it seemed like the only way to go, and I hated the OOP in PHP so I could never be bothered to learn it. There was an article about transitioning from GML to Pygame, and I knew that this was the best choice. ...Not so much. After a lot of stackoverflow comparisons about different languages, I stumbled across LOVE. Read about it, but I was finally getting accustomed to OOP in Python(almost to the point where you practice it until its boring), so I thought these crazy metatables were not even close to functional. ...Wrong again.

Finally getting into pygame, I was accustomed to delta time, and pygame isn't oriented towards it so much as frame based movement. After some videos on youtube, getting the Lua plugin for Geany(on Debian), I found how much more lightweight distributing games would be(Python requires a lot and seemed bulky even for minimal stuff). And after reading some post about comparing programming to painting on the forum here(good analogy), I started reading PIL and learning the syntax(and not just reading, practicing).

I'm a relatively new Linux user(Debian) Geany and Pinta(Paint.net for Linux)
And Win7 Notepad++ and Paint.net user(forever!)

I'll be asking a lot of questions, see ya around!
vynom

[shatterblast]

Welcome to the community. I hope you have fun!

[Ekamu]

Hello everyone!
And Win7 Notepad++ and Paint.net user(forever!)
vynom

Yeah \(>0<)/ Paint.Net and Notepad++ FOREVER! lol

welcome to the forums, I also messed around with python some time ago but I was immediately thrown off with tuples and strict indentation. It's probably still a good/decent scripting language but personally i find Lua a lot more intuitive and flexible, especially the data manipulation with tables. you can do a lot with such a simple tool and even more such as meta methods, OOP like you said is a little different with Lua, its more about using simple mechanisms to do complex things rather than heavy /strict syntax (like Python or C++).

As for LOVE its great, I hope it goes well for you. maybe it's not that "great" in the beginning (at least for me it sucked hard (>_<)) but after you learn to take it like a journey instead of forcing yourself to master Lua in under a week you will see how amazing your possibilities can be with something as open as with LOVE.

most of all have fun comrade! looks like you already know about game programming.

[vynom]

Thanks shatterblast, so far even the learning process has been enjoyable!

Ekamu, the indentation of Python really helped clear up some bad coding habits from years of sloppy PHP coding, so I am glad I took the time to learn it. But Lua's simplicity and LOVEs awesome API and lets face it, awesome community and devs that actually mingle with the users really says alot about them.

I've got tons of great ideas, but I think it'll be the games that you can't show anyone for a while. lol
Thanks for the welcome!