love VS A-Frame

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

... I remember inventing signals circa 2005 for a knowledge graph editor I worked on in GWT back when I didn't care about knowledge graphs. Not long after that I was using similar concepts to develop a complex Silverlight decision support application for sales territories.

I'm still a little appalled that people have forgotten how to make HTML form applications like we made in 1999 and frequently use React for things that don't really need it. React has, I think, one of the most elegant methods of implementing a widget set ever invented (sure beats XAML, FXML, Visual Basic, etc.) but it doesn't support a real answer to maintaining application state that would be adequate for applications as complex as RIAs made by early adopters in 2005.

My favorite use for React is

https://aframe.io/

which works like a cross between VRML and Unity Framework. Here you can easily build a virtual world that people can experience with desktop, mobile and VR headsets. Something you can't do with HTML forms!

I have a few side projects based on HTMX but I am pretty sure we will see something like it but better soon. In particular back end frameworks need to be updated for the new reality. Often you have a "component" like a dropdown box which can either be drawn as part of a bigger page or updated on its own and you really need some way you can reuse the HTML template for those purposes and hopefully also reuse associated code that does database lookups and such.

A lot depends on what kind of app you want to build.

For my current side projects I am interested in two kinds of technology.

(1) ML-enhanced apps that involve sorting and classifying content. Here I am drawing everything in the back end and using HTMX to partially update the screen to, for instance, create modal dialog boxes. The point here is that I want to quickly add new UI tasks and it will not be so quick if a front end build process is involved. (Notably in my system you can roll out a new task on the back end without reloading the front end)

My back end is Python which I am souring on. The basic problem is that it does not have threads. So if I have a 1GB ML model and a celery with 32 processes I could waste memory with 32 copies of the model. There are ways of working around all this but if I was just using Java, one copy of the model could be shared by any number of threads. Java doesn’t have the ML libraries though.

The general principle here is that the vast majority of React apps are just ordinary form processing apps that could be developed using the methods we used back in 1999 and seem to have either forgot or never learned (if we are young.). You could make the case that DX and UX were better then.

(2) Virtual reality applications using

https://aframe.io/

here there is no back end. With these tools you can make a world that is browsable with an ordinary web browser but put on a VR headset and you are there. This is another counter to the boring React app because it is something you could never do with an frontendless site.

Meta Quest also has full support for WebXR which lets you bypass all the app store BS. You can use this framework to make worlds visible on most XR headsets as well as desktop and mobile

https://aframe.io/

My understanding is that Apple is making excuses about being slow to support WebXR.

Meta Quest. It even runs on Android. For that matter, so does Magic Leap 2. If they deign to do so all the "usual suspects" who make Android phones could make Android-based VR headsets.

As much as the media has been obsessed with the train wreck that is Horizon Worlds, it's a well kept secret that Meta Quest has an app store that works like the app store on a game console. You can even sideload phone, tablet and TV apps and they "just work" most of the time.

There is no working "metaverse" and even meaningful multiplayer games are thin on the ground, but no shortage of good single-player games and what I'd call game-adjacent apps.

It's little recognized that XR apps are highly portable because they are almost always based on portable frameworks like Unity. In fact, just about every XR headset supports WebXR which makes it outright easy to make web-based virtual worlds

https://aframe.io/

these work with desktop, phones and tablets as well as most of the AR and VR headsets. All it takes is that you "think different" and choose to live life outside the app store.

WebXR is pretty amazing. You can make a site with

https://aframe.io/

which can be navigated with a browser on desktop and mobile. Using a VR headset you can give permission and… you’re in the world! It’s like one of those kids TV shows where people can jump into the world of a book.

With WebXR you can make applications that run on Meta Quest, Magic Leap 2, Hololens 2, PCVR and other platforms. It kinda drives me up the wall that so many people are hung up on Apple because AVP competes with quite a few different platforms that are all pretty similar and if this kind of thing catches on you’d better believe people will be porting applications between them…

To Facebook's credit, Facebook really is investing in developing a new platform, which is more than you can say about Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.

The reality is that Horizon Worlds is a joke (maximum 20 players in a world and you trade players for geometry, a 20 player world is much smaller than an 8 player world.) Horizon Worlds doesn't let you import images, video or sound.

A VR world has to fit everything you can see in a headset. A really big game like Asgard's Wrath 2 (absolutely amazing) is like an open world game which is full of hidden loading screens and it's quite expensive to develop if you want it to feel open.

By not letting you load those kind of resources HW keeps the size of the world under control, plus it disappears pornography, copyright violations and a whole lot of trouble. It kills HW for me because I want to make content based on photography and visual art, and kills it for commercial users because McDonald's just has to put a Coca-Cola logo on the side of the cup.

The MQ3 is basically an Android phone you wear on your face and the mainstream way to deliver apps for it is the same as a mobile phone. Unlike Apple, you can sideload, in fact you can sideload many ordinary phone apps, such as the Tailscale client or the Denon HEOS client and they usually work. It's not less any open an environment than mobile.

On top of that you can create webpages with WebXR that appear in VR at the touch of the button and this framework

https://aframe.io/

you can make worlds that are browsable on phone, tablet and desktop but that you can enter with a VR headset. (Makes me think of a few kids TV shows where the characters can jump into books) These are compatible across a range of devices such as the Hololens 2, PCVR headsets, and even the Apple Vision Pro.

Google and Microsoft provide plenty of models for half-baked efforts that end in failure (every time a B2B startup gets bought by Google the competitors have a meeting of their salespeople the next day and say... "YOU'RE ON COMMISSION, YOU'RE GOING TO GET RICH!) Facebook is the one big tech company that is seriously investing in a new platform and they deserve some credit for it, whereas all the rest of them are so wrapped up in "business theater" and "technology theater" that nobody realizes Google hasn't made anything since they bought YouTube.

Traditionally, VR and AR development involved complex frameworks and languages, but Node.js brings a fresh approach to the table. Its familiarity with JavaScript allows developers to write code for VR and AR applications with ease. By utilizing libraries like A-Frame for VR and AR.js for AR, developers can create immersive experiences directly in the browser using Node.js. This seamless integration opens up opportunities for a wider range of developers to enter the VR and AR landscape.

if there is none, how could it work? I'm not a dev, i work in design, UX, art. however this seems excellent system https://aframe.io yet I'm sure are others. runs in the browser, super fast, the code is just simple human readable, text, so works with HTML, JavaScript.

Well, that was a rabbit hole I didn't expect to jump down. I've never used these programs, but it looks like graphviz has a vrml output option. Vrml, now there's a blast from the past. It never really saw much adoption and has been superseded by other formats. You might be able to find some simple converter utility to convert it to gltf, which isn't a file format from the last century. There are lots of things that can view gltf files. I'm not sure if you can load them into the Quest web browser directly or if you need to wrap them into a simple A-Frame site first. You could also use sketchfab to view them, but you seem more like an A-Frame kind of guy. Oh, hey, it looks like someone built a vrml loader for A-Frame. If graphviz really can output to vrml and the loader works, that should make things super simple for you. Not really sure how well any of this stuff will work. Good luck.

You should also consider https://aframe.io/. I've used it to make small web apps. What's cool about a-frame is it's a JavaScript library and the augmented reality scene is defined as HTML, so you can deploy it just like you'd deploy any web app. And if they already know web development then it's not that too hard to pick up.