LÖVE it!

Much respect for the love2d.org crew.

From a personal(selfish) perspective, mainly I love that they will be contributing to the SDL eco-system, and showing us some cool ways forward.

I think pygame, and the rest of the SDL libraries can share code and ideas with them with Love(2d). Even though both use different languages on top, they both share similar languages below. There already has been sharing, and I hope it continues more in the future.

Also, I hope python developers will take note. Lua is a really fast language (especially with luajit 2.0). With love2d, and lua being included with apache those are two nice options for people to switch from python.

Especially with SDL 1.3 (forever) maturing and its TODO list reducing, it is a great time for simple RAD game libraries :)

LÖVE is excellent, especially for prototyping. The fact that you couldn't access pixel data of an image was possibly its biggest shortcoming, but that's fixed with 0.6.

Not a timid update. Angles were changed from degrees to radians and the origin of images was moved from the center to the upper left corner.

The courage to make dramatic changes bodes well for LÖVE.

Would love to play with it again, that is if the .deb file worked :(

    $ love
    love: error while loading shared libraries: libopenal.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
    $ ls -l /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2009-12-22 13:38 /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 -> libopenal64.so

Maybe it's looking in /usr/local?

Nope, was a permissions problem.

Anyone have any luck installing the library on Snow Leopard? The love.app binary for OS X is just a program that has a picture of a tank. I tried installing from source but apparently the configure file isn't set up to recognize where the OpenGL libraries are for Snow Leopard.

I haven't tried this yet, but ran into this problem earlier. I think the problem is that you're trying to launch the main.lua file, whereas you need to run love on the directory that that file lives in. (I rebooted to Windows, found the same thing happening, and figured I must be doing something wrong - tried the directory thing and it worked)

This seems like a nice alternative to Pygame. I doubt anyone wants to use SDL by itself for graphics, most people want hardware acceleration through OpenGL, and with Pygame they have to write it themselves.

For OpenGL on Python there is http://www.pyglet.org/ and http://cocos2d.org/

cocos2D is pyglet + bells and whistles. Pyglet is in a transitional period, particularly for the Mac port, which is in the process of being converted to Cocoa rather than Carbon. This is because the Carbon version won't run in the Python that comes with OS X 10.6.

In conclusion, while I think that pyglet's API is superior to PyGame's, for compatibility reasons I wouldn't use pyglet for a new project, at least not until we get the port finished.

I am aware that cocos2d is a layer over pyglet but it is a very good way of doing sprite animations. I like both pyglet and cocos2d and prefer them over pygame which in my opinion is not 'pythonic' enough.

Interesting, although as far as I can see, there's no way to distribute your game without the source code?

You could compile to bytecodes using luac, if that is a concern.

Thanks! The examples all assume source code, and I don't know much about Lua, so I wasn't sure.