back
91 comments
Lack of native mobile support was one of the reasons I dropped LOVE for other frameworks.

This is fantastic, and LOVE/Lua is really fun to work with, I highly recommend this framework.

Does love work well with moonscript?
What framework did you use instead?
Site is hugged to death. Google cache/mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
You mean Loved to death? ;)
This is wonderful. I'm quite fond of Lua and while I've tinkered with LÖVE here and there, the lack of mobile support turned me off from using it for serious projects. I'll be giving it another look soon.

As an aside, I'd like to plug a Lua library I have nothing to do with called middleclass [1]. I've used it with LÖVE and it's handy for game dev!

[1] https://github.com/kikito/middleclass

Middle-class is awesome, thanks for sharing that .. I'll put it on my lab bench for hacking over the next few days.

Continuing the list of 'handy little Lua libraries that others in this thread might be interested in', I'll add that I think that a lot of newcomers to Lua from languages like Ruby and Python might enjoy having lua-enumerable around as well, which provides a set of enumerable ops that fit in quite well with Lua's tables .. check it out:

https://github.com/mikelovesrobots/lua-enumerable

Hanappes' got a few nice Lua classes in its lang folder too:

https://github.com/makotok/Hanappe/tree/master/projects/hana...

Useful for newcomers to Lua and pro's alike, imho ..

LOVE uses LuaJit, right? How does that work with mobile where you may be denied execute access to the data segment?
To answer my own question, here's a quote from the LuaJIT website:

> Note: the JIT compiler is disabled for iOS, because regular iOS Apps are not allowed to generate code at runtime. You'll only get the performance of the LuaJIT interpreter on iOS. This is still faster than plain Lua, but much slower than the JIT compiler. Please complain to Apple, not me. Or use Android. :-p

Anyone got any games written using LÖVE to show HN?
When I had spare time I was working on a Terraria-inspired game. Here's a sample video of how far I got: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clxX8QZonL4 with the code here: https://bitbucket.org/sirpengi/lua_lovestory/src/tip?at=defa...

I ended up using luajit FFI to call into C to calculate lighting. I wonder what the FFI support is on the android/ios ports.

There is this: https://projecthawkthorne.com/ which is based on an episode of the TV show Community.

It is open-source and based on community effort. https://www.reddit.com/r/hawkthorne https://github.com/hawkthorne/hawkthorne-journey

I made oh my giraffe [1] in LÖVE and released it for iOS and Android using these ports.

[1] http://www.ohmygiraffe.com

A while back - I made an AI simulation with one of my friends for boid simulation using various path-finding algorithms on procedurally generated roads!

Photo: http://shakilthakur.com/content/images/2014/11/Screen-Shot-2...

Github: https://github.com/FourierTransformer/Boid_Racers

I started working on a snood clone. It's' still unfinished, but I've spent countless hours playing it mindlessly:

https://www.tbmatuka.com/blog/2014-05-31

https://github.com/tbmatuka/hennin

If anyone would like to knock a thing or two off the ToDo list, I'd appreciate it :)

Not mine, but one of my favorite games:

http://stabyourself.net/mari0/

We're using LÖVE for Pocket Rumble

The game supports lag-free rollback netplay using GGPO, and Steam matchmaking with ELO leaderboards

And since LÖVE uses lua, mod support is no problem to implement, so we'll have steam workshop support too (It's not released on Steam yet but will be soon!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL63nVwisAs

I released a game called Aerannis a while back.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/356580/

all my games were done in Love. My latest one: http://bitoutsidethebox.com/autumn/
A friend and I made a game for the most recent Ludum Dare using LÖVE. It's a top-down racer: https://github.com/zeta0134/ludum-dare-34
I would love to tinker with LÖVE, but I don't know the first thing about Lua. Anyone have pointers to good introductory resources they can share?
"Programming in Lua" is Lua's K&R. It is a very well written technical book.

The Lua reference manual is also very approachable.

http://www.lua.org/pil/

http://www.lua.org/manual/5.3/

LÖVE has their own recommendations on resources to learn Lua from here: https://love2d.org/wiki/Main_Page#Lua
For a couple of quick intros, try Learn Lua in 15 Minutes[1] and Learning Lua from JS[2]. For a bit more depth, try the Lua-users Tutorial Directory[3]. For serious depth, the two recommended by Gracana, PIL[4] and the reference manual[5], are fantastic. For an overview of the ecosystem, including some useful gamedev libraries and LÖVE-specific resources, take a look at awesome-lua[6] (my own, shameless plug).

http://tylerneylon.com/a/learn-lua/

http://phrogz.net/lua/LearningLua_FromJS.html

http://lua-users.org/wiki/TutorialDirectory

http://www.lua.org/pil/

http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/

https://github.com/LewisJEllis/awesome-lua

It is very minimalistic. There are only 8 datatypes: 4 immutable (nil, number, string, boolean), 3 mutable (table, coroutine, function) and userdata which is used for arbitrary opaque "exterior references". The standard library is fairly small. There is a small amount of "metaprogramming" possible that lets you overload operators and do some basic prototype-based OOP, but the whole thing is very approachable. Personally, I think it is one of the better options for a learning language because of how simple it is.
You can pretty much learn the language in 1 - 2 days if you are an experienced programmer. Try the LUA website, they have some links to good tutorials.
If you have some experience with javascript, Lua's syntax, scoping and structure are fairly similar to that of ECMAScript 5. That's a very macro and broad comparison of it, but if you have scripting language experience, you'll be fine.
How's the performance compared to say Cocos2d-X in C++? For say something like large scale steering forces and Behavior agents?
Lua is really easy to pick up, even without a book. Start using it with LOVE and have fun.
I encountered LÖVE when I was searching for simple graphics engine that can do 60fps consistently without frame skipping. It worked very well.
How does LÖVE compare with Corona SDK, a commercial Lua-based mobile framework?
LÖVE is free, open source, runs on desktop and mobile, local builds and so on. Also, it is based on SDL2 so, if you know C, you can modify the code.

That being said, Corona SDK is probably more mature for mobile. Personally I prefer LÖVE because of the fast iteration cycle do to local builds (Corona SDK builds the game on their servers).

Love is a bit more 'low level' than Corona. In LÖVE you have direct control over what gets drawn each frame, wheras in Corona you are more working with a scene graph (nested display objects).
Can you make networked multi player games in love that work on mobile?
A bit OOT, LibGDX is another game engine, but for the JVM (can use Java, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, etc), that runs natively on desktop, Android, Web (transpiled to JS), iOS (using RoboVM). It has Lua support as well through 3rd party.

Udacity has Nanodegree using it: https://www.udacity.com/course/mobile-2d-game-developer-nano...

Disclaimer: I'm writing a game using LibGDX.

I tried Löve a few times as well as many others while searching for an engine to make simple graphical/physical simulations using a dynamic scripting language in for work (using other libraries). It was okay but my favorite was Gosu (ruby/C++), I wish it saw more love.
Perfect timing to make a game over the christmas break :)
This is pretty grand news, and I never used Lua for game development. Congratulations.
One of the most consistent frameworks in LÖVE I know is https://github.com/necrophcodr/fuccboiGDX/
How does LÖVE users handle source being open when distributing games?

I would guess not everyone will be okay with their artwork, sound files and other resources being available so easily.

as a non game developer, LÖVE was the only framework using which I was actually able to create a small game . So simple it hurts.
What is really staggeringly missing is a web port!

It should be a click-away to run a LÖVE game in your browser. Its not. A few good prototypes have been made, but they are all abandoned? :(

Site's loading too slowly for me to get to the main page, so at the risk of starting a Haddaway thread…

What is LÖVE?