LÖVE

I have one word: "wow".
I am a self taught very average C programmer. I program a bit in Objective-C, because I like the language (not especially on Mac OS though, I use ObjC without any huge framework. Just for the language itself), and because OOP is so cool. And I am litteraly in love with Lua for a lot of reasons (I see it as a "do wathever you want and it works" language. So handy!)

Now, back when I was learning C, came a time when I wanted to "make games", you know, and the standard console wouldn't be enough for my huge game hxor skillz... I found SDL to be perfect: in C (so usable from ObjC), low level, quite easy to learn, multiplatform (very important to me the linux fan), etc. I made a few geek things with it (like a from scratch 3D engine "just to see how I would do", or a robot simulation) and felt confortable enough to start the new killer app concept.

I even integrated a Lua interpreter in the whole mess to allow scripting ability, and though it works, I never know where to put the data, and feel like I spend my time exposing C/ObjC stuff to Lua, and passing data back and forth between the two.

So the next step was: ah, I could just write everything in Lua and do only a minimal engine in C and SDL. Or best: find a wrapper that someone more experienced would have made.
Unfortunately, I had a hard time finding something good. The are several LuaSDL things around, some outdated, some very new and not portable yet.

Then I found Löve... (love the puns by the way)
And it feels like the best thing that ever happened to my dev life (which is usually the opposite... social life and computer programming... anyway.)
It seems to have all the features I kept recoding everytime (full cross platformability, standard game loop, events callbacks), or never dared to do (OpenGL acceleration + rotozoom, easy text rendering...).

I love the very simplicity of just having to define three functions, and let the engine execute them. At first i feared it would be a limit, but found in the No demo that it is easy to redefine these functions to enter a new game state. I haven't explored the possibilities of taking over the main loop to do dialog boxes or stuff like that, but i suppose et wouldn't be too hard.

And all of this in my beloved Lua ! Ah, bliss !

This is office hour so I won't be able to test this before a moment, but I already know for sure this is going to be great.

Sorry to spread my life like that, but I'm really glad I found this. Couldn't resist telling you!

See you (very) soon!

Hehe. Thanks.

I must agree with the original poster.

I'm a C programmer, had quite a bit of experience with Lua (used it in my previous company), and I'm always looking for a nice game engine.

I've found HGE, and the first thing I did was making a Lua wrapper for it. With that came a tetris clone (well, what else).

Even though I've been a professional C programmer for about 15 years (and have been around computers for about 25 years), I still struggle to sit myself at home and write a game. Apart from a few lame games on the ZX Spectrum, that tetris was the first reasonable game I've ever created. And I can't even play it - it's just too boring.

So I'm glad I've found LÖVE... Maybe I will finally be able to write a proper game. Now all I need is to stop finding excuses...

I've mostly had the same experience, only I started with Java from my Comp Sci classes, and I also know some C#. I found Lua through games like Garry's Mod, and I think it's incredibly easier to use than all those fancy compiled languages. I wanted some engine to test out the language and I found this. So far it's worked great, I'm converting one of the small games I made in Java over to Löve, and adding multiplayer by way of LuaSocket, which I happily found was incredibly easy to add to the engine(just copy and paste the folders to the top level ). Course, once Cortex Command get it's Lua implemented, I'll be going back to that, but for creating a standalone game using graphics, I don't see why anyone would not use Löve.

It's a little strange, really. LÖVE came about due to our need to have a 2D-graphics engine and that ones available (HGE, etc) didn't really work the way we wanted. It's strange that a mix of a powerful opengl-based engine combined with a simple but awesome (go suck a dick, Python) scripting language could yield such great results. We made LÖVE just because we wanted a system that worked the way we wanted it to and it's great to see so many people who löve it!

mike wrote:go suck a dick, Python

Would that make Python Outgay you?

On a more related note, yeah, Löve is an awesome engine. It's basically like the engine I've always wanted to write, but never managed to because I can never get the engine structure to work out right.

amnesiasoft wrote:

mike wrote:go suck a dick, Python

Would that make Python Outgay you?

Nothing. NOTHING outgays me. I dare you to try.
On a separate note: I just noticed that you got inspiration from NO. Which I must say is quite impressive as it isn't really coded that well.

mike wrote:I just noticed that you got inspiration from NO.

Wait, I did?

No, not you...

Tenoch wrote:...but found in the No demo...

I was writing to two people in that post and got a little confused.

mike wrote:

amnesiasoft wrote:

mike wrote:go suck a dick, Python

Would that make Python Outgay you?

Nothing. NOTHING outgays me. I dare you to try.
On a separate note: I just noticed that you got inspiration from NO. Which I must say is quite impressive as it isn't really coded that well.

NO sort of showed me how I could use metatables to open things up, so I certainly drew some information from it myself.

But Mike, I would really appreciate it if you could give us an example of something you thought _was_ "coded well." That would be very nice for reference.

--Mr. Strange