Full HD side-scrolling platformer with LÖVE. Is it possible?

[molul]

Hi Löve community! I've just registered to gather some information about LÖVE2D regarding a project I'm starting. It's like a classic Sonic game (or any other 16-bit era platformer such as Dynamite Headdy, Rocketknight Adventures or RIstar), but I want it to be full HD (something like the recent Rayman Origins).

I started this project a few years ago in a language called Fenix, but my programming skills were to poor and I finally got stuck and left it. Now that I know a lot more than back then I'm trying to restart it, and I started using Pygame, but I got stuck again because Pygame can't handle a 5 layer parallax with a 128x128 tiles background (it runs at 10fps).

I've asked in Pygame's mailing list about my problem, as I couldn't understand why that low fps rate in a modern computer, and they told me that SDL isn't enough to handle a project like mine, and I should use OpenGL with Pygame. So a friend of mine told me about Lua and LÖVE2D and I'm very excited about developing my project with this framework (also very excited about how powerful and simple Lua is), but I wonder if I will have the same problem.

So could you please tell me if LÖVE will suit my needs? Is there any similar project going on in this community?

Sorry for the long boring story, but as this is my first post here (the first of many many more, I hope), I wanted to tell you what I try to achieve. I hope not to bother you with many questions. Hopefully soon I will even be able to help some other users

Thanks a lot beforehand, and nice to meet you all!

[tentus]

Yes, it's very possible. There's a number of Love projects that use "hd" graphics without any trouble at all.

[molul]

Great, you made my day Thanks!

[tentus]

When making a platformer, the first thing that you're going to want to worry about is collision. I made a platformer called Kurosuke that uses love's built in physics, but I would actually recommend not doing that, and using one of the collision libraries that have been made: HardonCollider or Fizz come to mind (or Fizz X, a variant of Fizz). If I was to remake Kurosuke, I'd probably use HardonCollider, it does pretty much everything you need in a platformer and is fairly lightweight.

[molul]

Wow, thanks! I'm really impressed at how many tools are already there for developers (and I thought this framework was barely starting...). I think I'll enjoy LÖVE a lot

[Taehl]

As far as graphics, Love2D's name should make it clear that you can't have 3D characters or anything unless you pre-render them to a series of image files. So far, animation in Love is either frame-based or programmatic, however, I've currently got a (kind of stalled, to be honest) project to make a 2D, skeletal, tweening, frame-based animation (like Flash, TISFAT, etc.). HD graphics are no problem - your main limitation is your user's RAM and graphics card (Love uses OpenGL, so there's hardware acceleration making things nice and fast). But Love itself is perfectly happy with huge-resolution graphics, drawing thousands of images every frame, extreme zooming, and so forth.

My pet project, Underlife, is a platformer with semi-HD graphics (which is to say, per-pixel detail on modern displays, smooth dynamic shadows, and other HD goodness, but with an intentional semi-8-bit aesthetic, making use of pixel art, artificially low color count, and so forth). So it's certainly possible.

[tentus]

Taehl, I am willing to send you money if you ever get an animation editor released for TLBoner. I can't send you a lot, but several pizzas worth. Just let me know and I'll try to make it worth your while, I really don't want to have to write my own animation system.

Also worth pointing out to molul, there's no video support in Love. Getting AVI support would be a bloated nightmare, so it's probably never going to happen. Just letting you now about the framework limitations: I personally think prerendered cutscenes are a copout, but I know people who find that missing feature a dealbreaker.

[molul]

Thanks Taehl and Tentus. Good to know there's no video support (fortunately I didn't need it, as all the animation I was planning to do, would be in-game, a la Sonic 3), and no 3D support (I was planning on pre-render my sprites, so again, no problem).

Hey, many of this topic's replies could be part of Löve2D's FAQs: "What you can and what you cannot do with Löve2D". Heheh.

I've printed some "Lua for beginners" guides to read them when I go and come back to work, as I'm totally new to Lua. It doesn't seem too difficult (at least the basics), but I rather learn how to declare and access arrays and stuff like that before typing any code. Also yesterday I downloaded a few examples and I'm starting to understand Löve2D basics. It's kind of weird (and weirdly simple as well) at first, but I'm getting used to it.

I'm curious: is there any famous indie game developed with Löve2D? If not, I'd be surprised :S

[MarekkPie]

Famous and indie are oxymoronic.

[molul]

LOL. What about Minecraft, Plants & zombies, World of goo...? I didn't mean as famous as Skyrim