Ok maybe i'm stupid

[FRII]

but why have love.update and love.draw be separate functions? they're both called every frame, correct? update before draw, right? so why have them be separate?

[s-ol]

but why have love.update and love.draw be separate functions? they're both called every frame, correct? update before draw, right? so why have them be separate?

first because they are supposed to do very different things and therefore should logically be seperate. And secondly, with a custom love.run they might not both run every frame at all.

[Tesselode]

There's nothing inherently different about them. They're just split into update and draw for the sake of good organization. Also, update has the dt argument and draw doesn't, which reinforces that good organization.

[FRII]

so what y'all're sayin' is that the title is more a definite than a an inquisitive statement

[zorg]

More like the knowledge you lacked is now gained.
Now get back to work : 3

[bobbyjones]

but why have love.update and love.draw be separate functions? they're both called every frame, correct? update before draw, right? so why have them be separate?

They don't have to be separate. You could do all your updating in love.draw (actually some people do for technical reasons.) The only reason they are separate afaik is because of preference.

[unrecoverable]

They're separated so that it's easier to prevent game logic from interfering with what's displayed on screen. Without that distinction you just have to be more careful all your game logic is running before your display code.

[Sarcose]

Isn't love.draw() the only function that will put anything on the screen when love.graphics functions such as rectangle() are called?

Further emphasizing the organization aspect.

[zorg]

That's only because of what's inside the default love.run anyway.

[nkorth]

One reason to split update from draw: when you drag a window around, some operating systems will force it to redraw more frequently than it otherwise would. If the game can't redraw on demand, the window will flicker or turn black while it moves. I don't think Love2D does this by default, but you could make the draw function run when the OS requests a redraw, meaning it'd be running more often than the update function (and no flickering windows!)