What's ahead?

[_ex_]

Hello all,

first I want to wish an exciting and wonderful new year to all the core developers and maintainers of the engine, they rock!
also to all the lovely people here in the forums.

Well, my question is what is planned ahead for the engine?

I have used some free/commercial engines and I think LOVE is pretty near to fill a niche for indie game developers. I previously liked Playfirst Playground SDK, it worked fine in Windows and Macs and have somehow support for Lua scripting (in the GUI) but it was somehow slow and somehow big and obviously closed source and without Linux love, but it worked fine were it worked, was free for commercial games even. In those times there were lots of problems with older PCs and graphic cards and drivers that they conveniently handled. But I think LOVE is superior, being a MIT licensed game engine and using Lua for gameplay give us an advantage for easy game prototyping and development.

However I would love to see:

- Support for static linked games, for small or commercial games, maybe even allowing a C++ code route for advanced users.
The idea is minimizing the download code but also minimizing the deployment hassle. I know that SDL 1.2 is LGPL licenced but the new SDL 1.3 is going to be zlib licenced allowing static linking. The same for PortAudio + the Public domain Ogg Vorbis decoder: http://nothings.org/stb_vorbis/. Disabling box2d physics, sockets for games that don't need or are planning to use his own networking and physics libraries would be also awesome.

- iOS support, this could be difficult, however there are some projects like Cocos2d-x that I'm sure we can reuse somehow.
I know Android development is in the way, maybe we can share some of their advance also.

- Additional goodies: embedded/compiled/encrypted assets, localization support, xml parsing.

- More tools (but this is something the community must do) like: sprite packers, animation system, GUI toolkits, particle editors, etc, etc.

I think there are some commercial alternatives like Corona SDK that we can really beat due to its restrictive licensing and workflow, but some new contenders like Moai and cocos2d-x that also support Lua but are relatively harder to use and are somehow mobile centric are appearing.

Please don't consider this like I'm reclaiming these features, it's up to the author and the team to develop the engine in the way they see convenient.
By my part I'm planning to do some work in the first part suing LOVE engine as the base, and of course share my results (if any) because lately I have see the need of a minimal simple game engine without all the surrounding things I hate about current game engines and with cross platform support and enough power to make addictive 2D games. Of course is only a dream of mine

What are your thoughts?

Best wishes for all

[Jack5500]

The tools are pretty good with Love:

Particle Editor:
http://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=2110
Animation Library:
https://github.com/kikito/tween.lua

[bartbes]

Support for static linked games, for small or commercial games, maybe even allowing a C++ code route for advanced users.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean? How do you link lua code?
In any case, the love code itself has since long been capable of being compiled as a library.

Disabling box2d physics, sockets for games that don't need or are planning to use his own networking and physics libraries would be also awesome.

You can disable all love modules, and sockets aren't loaded without you explicitly doing that.

xml parsing

lol

[_ex_]

Support for static linked games, for small or commercial games, maybe even allowing a C++ code route for advanced users.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean? How do you link lua code?
In any case, the love code itself has since long been capable of being compiled as a library.

Disabling box2d physics, sockets for games that don't need or are planning to use his own networking and physics libraries would be also awesome.

You can disable all love modules, and sockets aren't loaded without you explicitly doing that.

xml parsing

lol

With static linked support I mean making a full game in C++, without Lua, I know it's possible but is not something that I found a tutorial or in the wiki.
well the XML part is not a joke actually we use a lot xml for localization and other things, but you can use Lua unicode support for this, wait lol

[Ellohir]

So you want Love to turn into a sort of 2D Unity Engine? I see Löve as a gift, because it's free and I can do whatever I want with it. I am definately not telling what to do people who give their work free. I won't ask to be ambicious to people who don't earn nothing from this.

More features would be nice, sure. But don't try to push it too much. It's a great gift, not something you bought and demand what your money is worth.


PS: Love devs, I love you guys

[_ex_]

But don't try to push it too much. It's a great gift, not something you bought and demand what your money is worth.
PS: Love devs, I love you guys

Yeah, i hope I'm not it pushing too much. If that is the impression I apologize.