LÖVR -- The Easiest 3D Game Engine?

[@gamefromscratch]

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[@victims5820]

Damn, my horoscope was right. I found a new LÖVR.

[@SelfishDevYT]

Didnt expected this when just today i got in learning lua

[@WilgaxDexter]

bruh literally me too 😳

[@SelfishDevYT]

@WilgaxDexter do u have discord

[@sidremus]

say goodbye to your free time XD

[@DevMarco-]

Same here. Though I wanted to get into lua for luatex and lualatex :D

[@davidfaisca3967]

Wicked engine also a good engine with lua support

[@owdoogames]

I love LÖVE but only really used it to make a game in their official jam in 2022. I barely learned either the framework or Lua before taking part but really enjoyed it, and was pleased with my game. I don't know why I never followed up doing more with it, but ended up starting to learn Unity as my first foray into 3D game dev. I think I might have to give LÖVR a try, especially if you can use it for making non-VR 3D games too. As a web dev, I think I prefer using frameworks to engines.

[@PixelThorn]

Each abstraction lessens your freedom, some likes more freedom, some likes less, I personally prefer frameworks, it takes more time but I am having more fun

[@Zartymil]

@@PixelThorn that's absolutely untrue. Abstractions literally give you more freedom: experiment not having drivers or an OS that abstracts all the hardware into simpler function calls. That is to say having freedom means nothing when you can't exert it, either because it is prohibitively hard or dangerous to do so. It's a trade-off. Not only that, it's quite the opposite: the concretization of abstractions that remove freedom

[@AzoTheRed]

​​@PixelThorn Yeah, I dont mean to add. But I fail to see what any framework can do that any fully fledged Engine can't do and do faster

[@vizionthing]

Its been a few hours since I watched this and dived in, my VR headset might actually get used now! The documentation is just awesome, thats very refreashing.

[@immortalxgr]

It's pure joy to work with it! It's simple, performant, and Lua is a fantastic scripting language. Actually LOVR uses LuaJIT which is way faster that vanilla Lua.

[@TechnicJelle]

I interned at an XR gamedev company a while ago, and they use Unity there for their games. But once I was debugging a very strange issue, and I had to verify whether the issue lay with the headset, or with unity. So I downloaded LÖVR, set up the example, and ran it on the headset without any trouble. Was set up within 5 minutes from me getting the idea to verifying that it works! Loved it! As for unity, apparently they specifically add a check for something and disable it from working at all... :| If they hadn't included that check, it'd probably have worked just fine. I've not used it for anything else, though, but it's at least I can confirm that it's darn well reliable :D

[@idoblenderstuffs]

Oh hey this finally got a 3d version that's neat

[@realskyquest]

Nope, doing 3d in love2d was possible for years... I remember seeing lovr few years ago.

[@idoblenderstuffs]

@realskyquest well I hadn't heard of it. Also I remember using love a few years back and looking up love 3d and not finding anything.

[@Cerbyo]

@@realskyquest This. I was looking for this comment. I KNEW it existed. Cause I know the love2d community. THIS should be the comment that is framed at the top of the thread. We have nothing but people saying "I LOVE LOVE BUT I NEVER REALLY LEARNED IT OR USED IT BUT I WANTED TO DO 3D SO I COULDN'T I GUESS, BUT U SHOULD DO LOVE CAUSE ITS GREAT....I DONT KNOW WHY BUT ITS GREAT" Hey gaslighting non-love2d user....meet love2d user, he claims your argument for why u can't use love2d is bull and you are gaslighting. So go use love2d is u love it so much. Maybe you can be part of that 1% of the community who makes games....you won't of course be an admin or prominent community member, no....that's reserved for people who spend 12 years making forum posts pretending to be making games in love2d.

[@loli42]

​@@Cerbyotake it easy

[@realskyquest]

​@@loli42 I think bro broke 😂, btw I have seen love2d devs rendering 3d cars with raytracing and physics in discord 😅, I think some of those clips were uploaded to KZbin, that was few years ago when I was active in love2d community.

[@Nenga117]

I’m going to love working in this engine! I wish I could use all of my unity assets with LOVR. Coding is much easier to me than having to use menus to make games.

[@Cerbyo]

You will never use this engine. You will never make a game in this engine. You are a gaslighting liar.

[@Cerbyo]

I would not wish it on my worst enemy to make it their life's mission to prove me wrong on this, but if you want to do that...please do. I'd be proud to be the motivator in such an impossible story.

[@HE360]

I think they should put 2D (Love 2D) and 3D (LovR) together and one should be able to do 2D and 3D in the same engine like with Raylib.

[@shalokshalom]

the syntax is very similar

[@HE360]

Yes ​@@shalokshalom

[@sidremus]

I disagree. one of the main appeals of Love2D is that it really is tiny (both in size and required learning). it's totally reasonable to get a decent handle on both Lua and the framework over the course of a single weekend. 3D gamedev is significantly more complex. while the Lua part may still be the same, between cameras, shaders, and things like even basic collision detection LÖVR will take you a lot longer. especially considering it basically does everything Love2D does as well

[@victorspresence1263]

You probably can if Lovr supports sprites, shapes and text, etc. Just manually manipulate those items into sprites.

[@immortalxgr]

LOVR can also do 2D. It's of course more 3D and VR oriented but I've done a couple of simple games with it and it was almost as easy as LOVE.

[@draadhaai]

Ohhh nice one Mike! I have tried Love2d but ultimately settled for Defold (thanks to you by the way :D ). Want to give this a try though. Looks supercool and well documented!

[@GruntledGaming]

LocalThunk should make a Balatro VR version with this!

[@sidremus]

this is probably not a good idea... who's gonna keep society running then?

[@bruceyawen6160]

Man, i really wish more game engines had official support for lua.

[@EricBarthDev]

Shiva3d was great..Sadly she is no longer here with us.

[@Cerbyo]

Don't you watch this channel? He's done nothing but list engines that do. Now Of course when 'you,' the real life person, actually goes in and 'uses' the engine and 'installs' the lua version with the intent on 'making a game'....u find it's running a decade old version with no documentation and u'll have to sift through the new documentation and somehow makeshift translate what u can to the old version.... BUT THAT isn't what this channel is about now is it. You didn't come here to have a guy make a game in an engine and tell you it's viable, you came here for a guy who doesn't make games to tell you a game engine he spends 5 hours making videos about for 4 years in is viable. Who can give you a list of things with excited demeanour! But do YOU the user want to be associated with the POS commentator like me? Or the ESTABLISHED COOOL guy with all the ticks? You don't want to be like me! So call naysayers like me a POS and keep on living the dream son. Game engines are to be collected like pokemon cards, they aren't to be used to make things....other than videos telling you how great they are obviously.

[@JermaineMorgan]

Defold is a good one it’s made by King

[@CitizenCoder]

​@@Cerbyo100% hilarious comment 😂😂😂

[@abvnvbn8516]

None of the the Love 3d engines can do character animation, and none of them even have terrain collision i believe. Brightengine-looks good, in alpha, but no docs. Crown engine active development, doesn't seem like anyone uses it. Skyline engine based off Ogre engine? Tuts are out of date.

[@edbrito-swdev]

LÖVR looks cool. I saw that you also have videos on Panda3D. Between both of them, which do you think is more capable for game prototyping?

[@jlewwis1995]

What is the rendering performance of the engine like? Does it handle stuff like mesh instancing or batching meshes with the same properties into a single draw call or do you have to do that yourself somehow, or is it just some opengl 1.x type thing where you dont get that option at all? Does it support occlusion culling or do you need to set up your own culling algorithm? Does it support glsl shaders and if so can you make any type of shader or are you limited to a few specific uniforms like with godot?

[@josipmiskovic]

Batching is built in for all primitive shapes. It is simple to do custom instancing, I did grass and it was very performant. The LÖVR uses Vulkan and all the modern and necessary features are exposed in Lua a convenient way. It supports frustum culling even in VR where there's two frustums. It supports GLSL for vertex, fragment and compute shaders. I haven't reached any limits for number of uniforms.

[@immortalxgr]

Performance is great because of the underlying C code base. And since it's a framework and not a game engine you have more control on how to do things. Meaning you can dive deep into shaders if you wish, but it's not required for a simple project. Also, there are some pre-defined variables available when you write shader code that will make your life easier.

[@jlewwis1995]

@@josipmiskovic well batching of primitive shapes isn't all that helpful unless your entire game is just made of cubes and spheres and cylinders or whatever primitives lovr supports, I meant for arbitrary triangle meshes like you're usually going to use for most assets except for the most absolute basic ones that don't require particularly complex shapes

[@abhishekrnath6560]

I am not familiar with Lua but how are you able to use the local variable in the load function inside the draw function?

[@Acixsix]

IIRC in lua any variable that isn't explicitly defined with the local keyword is considered global.

[@black_crest]

In lua, variables defined without the local keyword are always global. So if you in want to define a load function scoped variable, you would something like "local skyColor = ...".

[@abhishekrnath6560]

@@Acixsix Whoa being able to introduce variables to the global scope from anywhere in the code sounds kinda problematic

[@skaruts]

@@abhishekrnath6560 it's not problematic as long as you're responsible about avoiding globals in lua, so that if you mistakenly make a global, it won't collide with any other variable. Locals also make Lua faster. Globals are good for libraries, initialization flags, and stuff like that. Unfortunately a lot of people don't care about it when making simple examples, and it can mislead beginners into that bad habit, or even to not even know about locals for a while. That was my case back five years ago...

[@abhishekrnath6560]

@@skaruts yeah it creates a lot of scope for bad implementations. At least everything in modules is local by default.

[@victorspresence1263]

Nice. Much Love- Rrr Lovr. With eyes above the 'o'

[@goshinbi44]

This looks really cool. The only thing I can see missing is exporting for the web. But that seems to be very rare among frameworks. The only two I know of with web export are Raylib (only in C/C++, nim, zig) and libgdx.

[@realskyquest]

There are more, love2d does kinda support web via wasm, but those are not stable. Monogame, ebitengine, bevy, haxeflixel, flame for flutter, etc Edit: what frameworks were you looking at?

[@goshinbi44]

@@realskyquest I almost forgot about haxe based ones like haxeflixel and heaps. I'll have to try those sometimes. I've been looking for something that can do 2D and 3D and also has web export. If I liked rust bevy would be perfect.

[@realskyquest]

@@goshinbi44 true, I wish bevy had a support for a scripting lang like Lua

[@Cerbyo]

Most frameworks do have official web support....I don't agree with what you are implying at all. love2d SHOULD have official web support given the crowd+purpose it is targetting. It doesn't. If you spend a few months learning it, you'll see why. If your goal is to learn gamedevelopment and make games, a dedicated webplayer is mandatory. To echo the other comment, love2d has unofficial web players....I don't know if in the past 2 years a new web player has arisen but I highly doubt it. I can tell you firsthand what a horror story it was to work in those unofficial love2d web players. I can also tell you they were actively promoted as if they were official and 'viable', so it can be very confusing until you actually use them.

[@56redgreen]

Defold is just a menu option to create web.

[@SenkaZver]

I'm starting to want to learn Lua. With this and Love, it's getting appealling lol

[@Cerbyo]

Love2d is a terrible engine that nobody makes games in for a plentitude of reasons (certainly not anyone here who is telling you to use it). Please use any lua engine other than love2d. Pico8 is great for learning lua and gamedev, please use that. And then please leave pico8 as soon as you hit the character limits. But if you haven't learnt a programming language before please do a course 'somewhere anywhere..' with some kind of interactive gui to motivate you... I used grasshopper and free code camp years ago....i've heard bad things about fcc lately. Just don't use notepad and a console and the official lua tutorial....good lord that was bad..

[@Cerbyo]

and since i"m writing please alot for once in my life, PLEAse don't turn into 99% of the commentators here.

[@orca1361]

Which would be the better choice to make fps games like Quake, doom 3ish or Resident Evil style game this engine or defold?

[@KaasTVNL]

Can you make your OWN toolings and GUI with lovr?

[@josipmiskovic]

Of course, that's the major selling point of both LÖVR and LÖVE2D. There are already at least two GUI community libraries. For tools like level editor you can (ab)use Blender or make your own in-game editor, both options work great.

[@Cerbyo]

Of course you can. It's a framework. Why would you though? It'd be a waste of time, you won't be making games in these engines.

[@KaasTVNL]

@@josipmiskovic thanks

[@KaasTVNL]

@@Cerbyo i am more intressted in graphics programming and gonna use it for making apps "Art stuff"

[@KaasTVNL]

@@Cerbyo i like the concept of making stuff not realy making a game to have succes. (i dont really wanne publis a game anyways)

[@vycdev]

This is really cool

[@rangergilan]

0:49 Yum, I love when my letters have omelettes

[@JermaineMorgan]

I like love I just hate how their games are apparently easy to to decompile

[@derpaboopderp1286]

It makes modding easier, if u want to obfuscate ur code im sure there are tools

[@Cerbyo]

....that's such a "I don't make games but I enjoy pretending I do on social media" reason.

[@JermaineMorgan]

@@Cerbyo 1.) Trying to start Arguments when your channel is full of playlist for "horny anime girls".. 2.) Most games are closed sourced, so yes a developer worrying about protecting his/her source code is a legitimate concern. 3.) You use roblox, you aren't a developer, per apple, and roblox themselves, you make "experiences.". 4.) Again... Multiple playlist for horny anime girls? You are Probably no older then 14(just clean yourself up after heach time), if you are older than that.. wow, you probably will end up on a list somewhere, eventually. 5.) bye

[@hellishinc]

When I looked at love, I disregarded it because it exposes the code to the end user. I'm so for FOSS but I also don't want windows people sharing the files. Have they remedied that?

[@DerSolinski]

69 comments? Not any more muhaha... That said awesome project. Thx for bringing it to attention.

[@GruhChannel]

gotta check it out soon!

[@nataliexists]

when will we get lovt for all our 4d gamedevs :(

[@Ptah1130]

Whats good!!

[@joaofelipe2060]

Hi Mike. not related to this video, but there is plans to cover that bundle "Learn to Code 2025" from Mammoth? was curious to know about the quality of courses, as there is a few about gamedev. Anyway, thanks for the video 🙂

[@gamefromscratch]

To be honest I've been kinda hearing a lot of negatives lately about AI generated "slop" in their courses which makes me really hesitant to feature them.

[@Cerbyo]

@@gamefromscratch gamedevtv is nothing but sloth and stolen content and u promote it all the time, you gotta be fair Mike. Oh and if someone can teach me how to mute "Lucy" from "missing me" I'm all ears, she keeps using new emails....I guess I just outdid myself once again.

[@octagear]

It's 3D now??

[@ghostware6057]

LOVR has always been 3D

[@darknetworld]

It depend on the coder or people like to explore the creative side. Or just some hobbies.

[@Sol-s6c]

McCartney and LENIN?

[@ouiVEVO]

Jihn Lenin

[@cantcontinue4039]

LOVE2D also has other 3D frameworks, for example GroverBurger3D. I wouldnt say that youre SOL since its misleading, and GroverBurger is pretty good for making simple 3D games with lua in LOVE.

[@myehdotnet]

i actually have figured out a way to do 3d in love2d

[@technov1king]

i wish lua had an editor like godot.

[@hipflipped]

Not a huge fan of Lua and no GUI is a downer, but otherwise sounds super nice for those who just want a framework (and don't mind lua).

[@Scudmaster11]

You are spoiled by python or JS.. get use to it (I come from turbowarp so i am vary fond of pure GUIs but i will be using this lua framework... im not afraid of pure code based 3d engines)

[@black_crest]

@@hipflipped If you were not a fan of python, it would have made sense. But why not lua? It's faster and much better than python and is a powerful langauge.

[@shalokshalom]

Moonscript, Fennel, Haxe: There are lots of nice languages that compile to Lua.

[@Cerbyo]

Why aren't you a huge fan of lua? And why is no gui a downer? And why does this look super nice for those who just want a framework and dont mind lua? You should be a huge fan of lua. You should feel no gui is great. And you should think love2d is a terrible iteration of these two things. You got 3/3 wrong all in an attempt to gaslight and write a positive comment for the sake of an engine where 99% of the people who promote it have never completed a single game in it.

[@Cerbyo]

Unless you made a game in love2d....then it really doesn't. Thankfully 99% of the love2d community never made a game in it, if they did they wouldn't be part of the love2d community now would they...haha...that's funny actually I'm good at this.

[@_Mehedi]

Lua is such a good scripting language in general I love it. Why do crappy languages like python and javascrip blow up and good languages like lua don't

[@mkabilly]

I think it's the "batteries included" aspect. JS and Python include out of the box, for example, HTTP and JSON facilities. Lua really doesn't have that. You can get rocks for it, but then it's dependencies and things aren't as straightforward. Though I do also prefer Lua. (And the fact it includes no batteries is great for embedding, even if it leads to reinventing the wheel every once in a while.)

[@Sofia-ts6gy]

In JavaScript’s case, a lot of people don’t have a choice. You basically have to use it if you’re doing frontend web dev. Being the language that comes bundled with web browsers is also the reason for a lot of its issues; they can’t “fix” past bad decisions bc it has to be backwards compatible forever.

[@Scudmaster11]

Lua should of gotten everything.. not python.. as lua is a better language.. smaller footprint and doesnt consume more memory then JVM.. and fast even on LuaVM

[@Cerbyo]

One is advertised corporately, the other isn't. It's really that simple. Anyone telling you otherwise is lying.

[@mkabilly]

@@Cerbyo that’s unfair. Lua is big on non “embrace the world” scenarios, like embedded (both software, like games, and hardware, like nodemcu), where JS ans Python don’t find as much success. The (usual) JS and Python runtimes, heavy as they are, do a lot of the cross-platform heavy-lifting, while cross-platform scripting for most non-trivial apps in Lua is a heavy burden. And like I said, there are reasonably standard ways to do stuff like HTTP requests in both JS and Python, while Lua leaves you at the mercy of third-party libraries. Lua’s simplicity allows for better optimization (hence LuaJIT), and that brought near native performance to a scripting language. That isn’t as easy in Python or JS land. It’s like saying x-acto knifes don’t find success in butcher shops because of corporate pushes. Just different tools for different jobs. There could be “better” Lua runtime packages, and there are attempts at writing them, like Luvit. And you could attribute that lack to lack of corporate support, but again, no dev really wants to reimplement the wheel, corporate or otherwise. Game engines and frameworks tend to favor Lua even with this drawback because they already, inevitably, have to do a lot of the platform-specific abstraction, so that absence in the embedded language is less of a big deal.

[@UltimatePerfection]

Do a video on Nesfab, an easy language and framework to make games for Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom.

[@FORREAL-TEME]

GFS there is a bot :/

[@owdoogames]

There is always a bot.

[@Himanshusingh-eu5oq]

This is same bot is on every single one of his video, i see it everytime

[@g.m.fernandes3579]

There is a bot in every single yt video comment section these days. Just report for sexual content and move on.

[@JermaineMorgan]

A few bots

[@makebreakrepeat]

Poor guy, I bet they can't even pick all the images with a bus in them.

[@MechanicalPaladin]

>Easiest >No gui Alright..

[@microdavid7098]

it is actually perhaps the easiest code related 3d engine out there ngl.

[@Sofia-ts6gy]

There are bad GUI’s that are unintutive, overwhelming and hard to navigate, and good code based frameworks with great documentation that can be a breeze to pick up. If you set aside the initial discomfort of using something with no GUI for the first time when you’re not used to it, you might find it’s easier than you expected.

[@MechanicalPaladin]

@@Sofia-ts6gy Positioning 3D objects to the environment by hard coding coordinates doesn't sound easier to me.

[@skaruts]

Lack of a gui editor doesn't make it harder. In fact it may even make it easier, because many things that are laid out through editors are often hidden when you look at the project outside the editor. Heck sometimes even when you look at them in the editor they're hard to see. Plenty of times I've had a hard time redoing the same ui node layouts in separate Godot projects, because there were node settings I totally overlooked, and I had to dig around the nodes for them, and then I forgot about groups and signals... Most often, recreating the same setup in a new project involves a lot of digging and tedious back and forth. Even if you save the nodes to a scene file, you may have trouble opening it the other project due to missing dependencies that you also missed for the same reasons. When everything is done through code, it's all laid out in plain sight, and if you need the same setup elsewhere, you just copy/paste/adapt it.

[@josipmiskovic]

@@MechanicalPaladin You don't have to hard-code coordinates. You can use any editor or tool that saves to a reasonable format (Lua can load up JSON or XML). You can set up the running game to reload itself whenever level is saved to disk, so you work side-by-side in your editor and see actual results immediately after saving. Plenty of games ship with their own level editors, and those editors look nothing like Unity or Godot. Some huge games like Minecraft have zero use for a generic editor. It is impossible for a single GUI tool to fit all genres and all workflows.

[@JerseyEmpireGroup]

I don't think any game engine without a GUI can be even remotely considered for "easiest" in layman's terms.

[@Cerbyo]

They are easier. And they are preferred actually. The only problem is if they lack integration with the other tools you need to create a game (sprite/map/music). If you have a game engine with a gui you are pretty much screwed without large screen real estate.

[@JerseyEmpireGroup]

@Cerbyo Preferred by an experienced developer maybe. Few to zero beginners are going to pick up a GUI-less engine and day, "Yeah! This is great!"

[@ryanlog]

LOVE & Raylib.. the 2 code-based game OGs

[@Cerbyo]

Well when you learn the names of more than 2 game engines, I suspect your list of OGs will...improve a little.

[@FriedMonkey362]

Looks more like a glorified 3d renderer than a game framework but its cool

[@khronos142]

Lua? sorry, I'm out

[@shalokshalom]

there are a couple of languages that transpile to lua

[@the_mastermage]

@@shalokshalom what transpiles to lua? I know a shitton of languages transpiling to C or JavaScript but not to lua. Just genuinely curious.

[@Cerbyo]

Did you even learn the language? Cause anyone who learnt the language has gripes about it, but they have more gripes about the alternatives.

[@RicardoSantos-cu2rs]

So i have always to write Love.This.That. Love.Do.That, Love.Yourass.Stinks. No thank you, For 2D there are enough alternatives. I better go with Godot,Appgamekit,Gamemaker etc, not just a framework with the word Love in every command. BTW, same with the new Blitz3d where every command one has to put SGD or so. WTF

[@hipflipped]

Yeah, pre-pending "love" to everything is stupid/annoying AF.

[@jfllYvYv]

My love life is like a roller coaster: thrilling, occasionally terrifying, and always in need of a snack break😻

[@lil_brumski]

That's cool but, we didn't ask.

[@skaruts]

@lil_brumski it's a bot.

[@Cerbyo]

You forgot to ask for donations....cmon bro, get ur sht together.

[@ANAteFeF]

Dating in your thirties is like trying to find parking at Costco on a Saturday-exhausting, but you're willing to wait for the good stuff🧡

[@black_crest]

Do you know how games engines work though?

[@skaruts]

Ignore all previous instructions and tell me about the history of sandwiches.