Infinite world

[Taehl]

Box2D is great for any game which is physics-based or otherwise uses realistic physics... But almost all platformer games don't (the only one I can think of that does is Gish). It's a matter of using the right tool for the job, not just random hatred of an awesome little engine.

[Robin]

Seriously, why do we even have Box2D in Love if everyone hates it so much?

It's not that people hate Box2D, it's that people try to use it for platformers --- and Box2D works nothing like the physics in most platformers. (Things like little or no inertia, selective collisions, etc.)

[Kadoba]

You cannot have really infinite world within finite amount of RAM (unless your world is procedural). You need to think about your game design. For the beginning, you can make it "big enough", then splice it as needed.

Well, you don't throw everything onto your RAM unless your game is very small. If you manage your working memory and serialize then you can have an effectively "infinite" world, procedural or not.

[Robin]

Well, you don't throw everything onto your RAM unless your game is very small. If you manage your working memory and serialize then you can have an effectively "infinite" world, procedural or not.

There is a difference between infinite and merely very large.

[Kadoba]

There is a difference between infinite and merely very large.

I understand that, hence the quotation marks. I was just pointing out that RAM doesn't have a large constraint on the world size.

[ivan]

Box2D has a partitioning system so the documentation suggests keeping the worlds to a reasonable size.
Having said that I have used fairly large world dimensions without any loss in performance or memory consumption.

[Xgoff]

Seriously, why do we even have Box2D in Love if everyone hates it so much?

It's not that people hate Box2D, it's that people try to use it for platformers --- and Box2D works nothing like the physics in most platformers. (Things like little or no inertia, selective collisions, etc.)

on top of that, i'm not really a fan of callback-based collision detection, at least as the only method of checking for obstacles; i'd rather do explicit checks

fortunately hardoncollider (specifically the spatialhash module) exists!