game-engine-2d VS love

I don't think it's unpopular. We need more and better game software, what exists today is unsatisfactory for a plethora of reasons. I'm personally interested in this because I ship Planimeter Game Engine 2D, which comes with client-side prediction standard, and it's the largest pure-Lua game engine on GitHub.[1]

[1]: https://github.com/Planimeter/game-engine-2d

> Another benefit of speculative collision is that I can elminate[sic] the polygon skin/radius on collision shapes. That was necessary to keep shapes separated for the time of impact algorithm. This should no longer be necessary in version 3.0. I never liked this artificial separation of shapes.

Hah! In Planimeter Game Engine 2D, we shrink physics objects by approximating the polygon skin so that we can achieve "pixel approximate" physics.[1]

[1]: https://github.com/Planimeter/game-engine-2d/blob/master/eng...

From what I've found maintaining https://github.com/Planimeter/game-engine-2d is that you should be explicitly checking for nil, separately from checking for false-evaluating values.

We found that this had the added benefit of semantically checking for something that did not exist, versus some contextual "false" value.

I suspect this is a good practice in other languages as well.

Maybe consider https://github.com/Planimeter/game-engine-2d? We have multiplayer with client-side prediction out of the box. Example code is included to demonstrate the ease of networking entity fields, and there is an included payload abstraction for creating networked events.

You can set the tick rate for your game based on your needs as well. And prediction is robust, supporting exceptional packet loss and smoothing over latency concerns for player movement.

Examples in Lua/LOVE:

https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk/blob/master/engine/sh...

https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk/blob/master/engine/sh...

https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk/blob/master/engine/sh...

https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk/blob/master/engine/se...

I remember having to write something similar for Lua, because there was no math.approximately() function and I was dealing with networking floats and comparing values over the wire to predicted movement in 2D space.

https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk/blob/master/engine/sh...

What’s so great about ASN.1 and it’s encoding rules is that anyone writing type-length-value serialization for networking purposes, for example[1], is basically independently reinventing ASN.1 because it’s so fundamentally optimal.

It truly will make you wonder why Protobufs and others exist.

[1]: https://github.com/Planimeter/grid-sdk/blob/master/engine/sh...

I've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience).

* When a cell is born it randomly takes on the color of one of its (3) parents.

To try it out:

1. Install LÖVE for your device from https://love2d.org (~5MB and open source). (iOS requires building from source on a Mac, or installing the third-party Love2D Studio: https://love2d-studio.marknoteapp.com)

2. Install my Lua Carousel from https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel (~100KB). It includes all its source code and can be edited live on a computer as it runs.

3. Copy the ~100 lines of code from the bottom of https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/651711/new-version-after-9-days and paste them into Lua Carousel.

Probably the most important piece of software we'll be playing around with is a game engine called LÖVE. Lua is well known around developer circles as being a good scripting language when it comes to making games, and this engine is one of the more popular. I'll be going through installation at the end of this post.

I got it – these are the steps I took:

1. Download Love from https://love2d.org/

libGDX is great, but I can understand if it's not for some people. This also applies to love2d, raylib and Monogame

You don't need to use git if you don't want to. Try downloading the 0.10.2 source directly here (the file you want is love-0.10.2-linux-src.tar.gz); I see you've tried this already but try again just to see what happens. Extract it to a directory (e.g. love-0.10.2-linux-src) and then run:

Love2d (MIT/C++/Lua) https://github.com/love2d/love

- Löve (doesn't have a separate page, but showcases a few games at the bottom of the page): https://love2d.org

The game, Wasp Escape, was built using the open-source Löve 2D game library for Lua.

love2d (lua) is a productive, fun, good docs, and most importantly proven / field-tested 2d game library, with easy to learn fast to compile and fast to run language - lua. while lua might not have a lot of features as python, the big bonus is that its much more focused language, which is important because otherwise you can get easily distracted on bells and whistles that other programming languages provide, i know that from experience