LÖVE

First of all - great idea guys! Both the blog itself and the content are looking great! If I find myself with some more free time, I'll definitely send in an app to be a writer.

Regarding the "make a game tutorial" idea - I agree! Not only does it encourage newbies by rewarding them for completion with a playable product, but it also helps them understand the entire game design process - an understanding that will hopefully prevent a few projects from being abandoned. I think it'd work well as a series, with each article bringing the reader through the steps until you get to a complete game (with a basic menu, score and lives if applicable, etc...) in the final article. You know, start with defining the concept and coming up with ideas (i.e. writing a mini design doc), then set up LOVE and a the base project files, setup a player and movement, etc... This would be a fairly large commitment for whoever is writing it, but I think it'd be a great gift to the community (I would attempt to write something like this myself, if I had the time).

If someone was interested in doing this, I would recommend Pacman as a good game to do a tutorial series on. It's a well-known game with simple mechanics and a single level layout, but creating it would still teach plenty of important things like player movement, simple animations, tilemaps, tilemap collision, pickups, enemies with simple AI (remember: despite the many Pacman clones that have the ghosts running around aimlessly, they do have actual AI in the original), different enemy states, score (and possibly a high score table), lives, etc...

Lafolie wrote:The real Pacman AI was actually pretty darn clever.

Yeah, I've seen that article - very interesting stuff!

When the blog was created, I thought it was going to be for posting Löve updates... guess i was wrong.

master both wrote:When the blog was created, I thought it was going to be for posting Löve updates... guess i was wrong.

From my intentions, the blog is for anything LOVE. Put in an application for becoming a writer, and make it happen!

Aside from the commit splunkers (I admit to following this via RSS), I can only imagine new feature posts are going to come out when LOVE hits a tag (e.g. when 0.9.0 comes out). Not everyone has the fortunate ability to understand everything that gets commited, and what it means.

I would like to mention some updates as well;

• More socialness;

  

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• Lua Syntax Highlighting!

  

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Sorry for the double-post, there's a lot to respond to, and I already posted the updates post.

monsieur_h wrote:However, I advice to use more images. This helps comprehension, especially when dealing with 2d math.

I entirely agree. I would like to avoid an overuse of silly meme's and such, but I would love to see more color in the blogs!

MarekkPie wrote:I'll make some super sweet MSPaint style art for you all.

Some of us are designers or Photoshop/Gimp users. Don't be afraid to ask folks for help!

MarekkPie wrote:

• Essentially rewrite the PiL chapters on object-orientation, which may delve into areas that the beginner Lua audience might get scared away by. Additionally, this is a very large topic, and would probably need to be stretched out over several posts to cover everything pertinent to classes (i.e., inheritance, polymorphism, metamethods, the colon syntactic sugar, privacy, etc.);

I really like this idea. I'm not sure there's enough material like this that relates to LOVE.

markgo wrote:[Lots of great ideas for posts]

Santos wrote:[Lots of great ideas for posts]

This is most definitely in the spirit of the blogs!

scutheotaku wrote:I would recommend Pacman

This would actually be a rather advanced tutorial. Pacman is not nearly as simple as one would think it is, just as Lafolie points out;

Lafolie wrote:The real Pacman AI was actually pretty darn clever.

josefnpat wrote:

master both wrote:When the blog was created, I thought it was going to be for posting Löve updates... guess i was wrong.

From my intentions, the blog is for anything LOVE. Put in an application for becoming a writer, and make it happen!

Aside from the commit splunkers (I admit to following this via RSS), I can only imagine new feature posts are going to come out when LOVE hits a tag (e.g. when 0.9.0 comes out). Not everyone has the fortunate ability to understand everything that gets commited, and what it means.

cool updates...

Sorry if my last post sounded a bit rude, I really like all the post that are appearing, they are really helpful, but I would really like to see an article about all the stuff that is happening in bitbucket. I have seen the commits, but I don’t understand them, there are some stuff like mipmaps, love.math?, OpenGL ES, SDL 2, and many other thing that would be great to be explained in an article. Somehow, all this updates are making me exited about 0.9.0, and it would be great to know all this stuff. (or maybe I’m just been an idiot to be exited on stuff that are probably common updates, in that case, don’t listen to me)

Just take my opinion as a suggestion.

josefnpat wrote:

scutheotaku wrote:I would recommend Pacman

This would actually be a rather advanced tutorial. Pacman is not nearly as simple as one would think it is, just as Lafolie points out;

Yeah, I'm really familiar with Pacman and its AI. The AI is "clever," but is definitely pretty simple (no real pathfinding, only a few simple states, etc...). As that article puts it, "Pac-Man is an amazing example of seemingly-complex behavior arising from only a few cleverly-designed rules." Anyway, I think that it would be good for a series since everything else about it is extremely simple (basic movement, basic tile-based collision, a single level layout throughout, simple game mechanics), so as the series goes on one would be eased into tackling slightly more difficult problems like the AI

master both wrote:there are some stuff like mipmaps, love.math?, OpenGL ES, SDL 2, and many other thing that would be great to be explained in an article.

I'm not personally going to write a long blog post about new features yet, but...

• OpenGL ES 2.0 support is being tested. It will probably not make it into 0.9.0, as a) it requires either SDL 2.0 or some ugly hacks, and b) the major platforms that require it (aka mobile) also require many other internal and API changes and additions.

• SDL 2.0 is the future, but it still has plenty of bugs and incomplete features, and probably will not be released by the time the rest of 0.9.0 is done, so it's not likely any feature requiring SDL 2.0 will make it into 0.9.0.

• love.math is a new module, it currently has pseudo-random number generation (fast uniform Xorshift as well as separate gaussian distribution) functions, and a polygon triangulation function. Both were added very recently, so there may be more to come before 0.9.0 is complete. vrld can probably talk more about love.math.

• Mipmapping is a technique most often found in 3D games. In LÖVE, it will give large performance improvements and get rid of ugly noise/artifacts, when drawing downscaled images with mipmap filtering enabled. In a nutshell, repeatedly downsized versions of the image will be auto-generated, and the most appropriate size for the scale you're drawing at will be chosen by the GPU. I explain it a bit more here (although Fonts no longer have mipmap support, and the API has changed slightly).
Performance demonstration from the above link: mipmapping off, mipmapping on. The original image size is 512x512. Keep in mind mipmapping is only relevant for downscaled images.

Aside from the existing changes in 0.9.0, there are a few others which are likely to make it in, such as textured polygons in the form of Geometry. More large changes and additions are certainly possible, but I don't want to make any promises.

Oh man, I am quite happy to see this idea actually took off! I'll try to come up with something useful to write about and make a contribution in the near future.