LÖVE

Hey there, I'm learning Lua for some weeks now and I thought I'll do some projects instead of writing useless random programs. Since I've allready had such a thing going on using Visual Studio, I've tried to do some kind of management simulation game which consists mainly of menus and clickable stuff as an interface while the "game" itself is manipulating data and so on. Think about old 90s football manager games and so on.

In Visual Studio, it's been easy using Windows Forms to have an interface, but what about Love2D? I bearly find any good and up to date GUI libraries. Maybe it's just the wrong framework for my needs? Is it designed for platformers and similar only?

I'd love to get any input

Well the Visual Studio Windows Forms is not nearly the same stuff as video game GUI. With that in mind, LÖVE's libraries are perfectly adequate. There's even a binding for "industry standard" imgui library.

You can make anything with löve, there's no restrictions on possibilities, only your imagination.

Löve was designed as a framework for "2D Games", but that also includes way more genres, than just "platformers". Basically, all of them.
It can also do mode 7-like fake 3D (and with some tweaks, real 3D as well), and the 2D thing didn't stop people from writing raycasters and doom clones, nor implementing true 3D renderers within it... or me writing composing software in it.

Most old Windows 3.1 "games" like ones you may have not even heard of were all written with gui libs (or just their own code) that weren't even using any graphics cards, simply because they didn't exist yet. Even the Win95 Hover! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover!) game, to my knowledge, was not hardware accelerated. Also, they looked the part... although they were still way more enjoyable than most mobile games getting released nowadays... >_>

The one thing löve can't do (by default), is use a non-GPU-accelerated window where you'd build up your GUI using elements rendered by the CPU alone. (so, no GTK+ or Qt libraries in there for that; nowadays games are always either OpenGL or DirectX accelerated (or Metal...))

And yes, finding a good GUI lib is somewhat hard, you may want to write your own solution instead.

typx wrote: ↑Fri Apr 06, 2018 10:56 pm In Visual Studio, it's been easy using Windows Forms to have an interface, but what about Love2D? I bearly find any good and up to date GUI libraries. Maybe it's just the wrong framework for my needs? Is it designed for platformers and similar only?

It's certainly not limited to platformers. But it was built with a certain type of game in mind: 2D, graphics-oriented games. Yes, it's an extremely broad category, but it doesn't cover everything. This is just my opinion as someone who has been using LÖVE for a while now, but there are two kinds of software I would NOT attempt with it:

• Fully 3D games.

• Extremely GUI-heavy applications (especially if you want them in the style of your operating system).

If it's already easy for you to create Windows forms with Visual Studio, I would suggest sticking with that for your football manager sim game. It is NOT a trivial task to create a full-features GUI system such as that built in to Windows. Dozens of different control types with various states and data types, copy & paste integration, keyboard & mouse inputs, and so on.

If you also plan on having a fully animated "play mode" of your football game in action, well LÖVE would be great for that part. Maybe you could devise a way to link your GUI app to a LÖVE program, so that the GUI side generates the data, and the LÖVE side operates on it.

zorg wrote: You can make anything with löve, there's no restrictions on possibilities, only your imagination.

Well, sure ....

If someone is more comfortable using LÖVE than any other tool, and they have lots of time on their hands, they should go for it. I think most of us just want to create a game though, not reinvent the wheel.

Well, sadly the extremely GUI-heavy style is what I do need, I guess. The "play mode" is not what I am focusing on. Actully, I totally suck when it comes do graphics design I just wanted to try something new, espacially multiplatform viable so I found Löve and thought it could work out quite well. I don't even need that many input controls, but I have to present lots of data in some way. I'll take a look at the imgui library bindings but I guess it will be a lot of work and don't know if its worth it, espacially for leanring a new language, when 80% of the stuff I'll have to do is setting up the GUI and make it work

Dude.. the language is irrelevant. I didn't know Lua before but I've made some fun stuff with Löve, and I intend to carry on.

GUI stuff is, honestly, easy. It's just simple maths. Sure, *making* a good UI and UX is difficult, but It's a different skillset to programming it. But given what you want to happen and how you want it to work, Löve is very easy to work with to make it happen. And designing the UI is a different concept to making it actually happen, which I keep having to explain to my co-workers.

Löve is easy to work with. Given a good UI spec - made by yourself or not - if you know basic programming and maths, making it happen is easy enough

Well if you want to make a spreadsheet simulator, maybe LOVE nor any other video game engine is suitable. I'm pretty sure you can achieve great success using HTML though. And you can attach a game to it using JS. Then you can package it together using stuff like NWJS. Of course that also means you can just make your game web-based and leave it at that.

Don't let em kid you. Lua is dead simple and Love2D gives you everything you need at a fundamental level.

You might have to roll your own libs for a few things, like graph drawing, and controls, but this is standard really basic stuff--and if you're new to either lua or love2d having to rewrite things you take for granted will provide you a reasonable, well-paced introduction to how things work.

Start small and build from there. If you're willing to obey what I just told you, then yes, love2d is right for you.