Sorry for the bad pun, I really am. Not sorry enough not to make it mind you!
Anyways… Love 0.9.0 was released today. In case you haven’t heard of it, Love is a 2D Lua based game development framework that was previously featured in the Battle of the Lua Game Engines post. From the release notes:
After a very long year-and-eight-months since the previous version’s release, LÖVE 0.9.0 is out at last!
The full changelog is massive, easily the biggest in LÖVE’s history (when counting by number of individual changes listed). It can be viewed down below as well as in the Wiki. Here are some of the more noteworthy items:
LuaJIT is now being used by LÖVE by default for most operating systems. Depending on what’s bottlenecking your game’s performance right now, your framerate could skyrocket just by updating to 0.9.0!ENet: real-time networking in games is a complicated topic. Thankfully, people have created libraries to help deal with some of the lower-level nuts and bolts. One such library is ENet. LÖVE 0.9.0 includes the lua-enet wrapper for the ENet library (alongside the existing general-purpose LuaSocket library), so you can easily use ENet’s features in your games with require("enet").
love.joystick: previous versions of LÖVE had support for joysticks and gamepads, but the love.joystick module was lacking in some key areas.
Version 0.9.0’s joystick module has been completely revamped – Joysticks are now actual LÖVE objects, they can be hot-plugged and removed at will (with event callbacks to match), gamepad motor vibration is now supported, and issues with differences in gamepad buttons and axes across operating systems and gamepad models is now much easier to deal with thanks to the new abstracted Gamepad API.Windows (not the Microsoft variety): functions for dealing with LÖVE’s window have been split from love.graphics into the brand-new love.windowmodule. The new module also includes new functionality (and better handling of the window in general, thanks to SDL 2): it’s now possible to use resizable, borderless, and “fullscreen-desktop” / “fullscreen-windowed” windows, as well as to choose which monitor the window will use.
love.graphics: Along with some general house-cleaning of this module and performance improvements to love.graphics.print, ParticleSystems, and SpriteBatches, lots of new graphics functionality has been added. Arbitrarily textured and colored polygons can be created thanks to Mesh objects.Shader objects (renamed from PixelEffects) can now be vertex shaders as well as pixel shaders. Mipmapping support has been added to images, compressed texture formats can be used now, and that’s only a handful of the new features in love.graphics.
love.math: Another new module! This one includes mathematical functionality relevant to games: a PRNG (and random number generator objects), polygon triangulation, Bézier curve objects, a Simplex noise generator, and more goodies.
love.thread: The thread module has an entirely new way to communicate between threads: Channel objects. It’s much more flexible than the old API.
There are many more new features, but reading paragraphs about them can get tedious. Check them out on the wiki!LÖVE 0.9.0 breaks compatibility with nearly every 0.8.0 game.
Several functions have been renamed (and some functionality has been changed or removed) in order to provide a more consistent and clean API experience. Often this will mean simply renaming some functions your game uses, but it will be rare for a game to work completely in both 0.8.0 and 0.9.0 unless it is written to do so.
Check the wiki! It will tell you what the new name of a renamed function is.0.9.0’s Mac OS X system requirements are higher than 0.8.0’s: it now requires Mac OS 10.6+ and at least an Intel Core 2 CPU (~september 2006 or newer).
Full change log available here.
Head on over here to get started.
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