It sounds like that term (“H1Bs”) is simply shorthand for foreign citizens that are potential candidates for U.S. work via an H1B visa. Why is that bothersome?
Genuinely, I don't understand this take. 2024 brought huge additions like Solid Cache, Solid Queue, and Solid Cable, the stable version of Strada (Hotwire Native) which completed the current vision for the Hotwire stack, in addition to Kamal (let's not sell that short, because whether you personally like it or not, it's a fairly robust tool for what it's meant for) and other niceties. Even if you don't like one/all of these, I don't understand seeing these as small advancements of the framework, particularly in a single year.
And many other frameworks did it too. LÖVE decided it's out of scope, and that's a 100% valid choice, considering the breadth and complexity of the problem. They still went quite far in ensuring it's no more difficult than it actually needs to be. Similar with e.g. cross-compiling Go programs (unfortunately, no cgo-less, cross-platform framework for interacting with windowing systems/video hardware exists).
Yes, but most other engines are much larger scope and fundamentally different purpose than LÖVE. DragonRuby, however, is in the same camp: code-first, scripting language (Ruby vs Lua), beginner-to-expert friendly. So my point was there are (at least one) project(s) very similar in purpose and size/scope to LÖVE that did solve for cross platform.
To the OP, try DragonRuby for your next game if you miss hot reloading but like the scripting, code-first nature of LÖVE. It’s also cross-platform. Not sponsored, just a big fan and it scratches many of the same itches as you described with LÖVE.
Hmmm. DragonRuby seems to be a closed source proprietary game engine (at least as far as I can tell). With open source engines like Love2D / Godot / PhaserJS / Pyxel becoming more popular - this may be a deterrent for many devs on HN.
Something else to consider is traction, if you get stuck in DragonRuby there's probably not a huge amount of docs/tutorials around it. That being said, it does seem like they have a pretty active Discord at least.
I totally get it - I'm not definitely not casting aspersions on their choice to go commercial with it. I just feel like with the insane Unity pricing restructuring (which they ultimately rolled back) - a lot of game devs have been pretty gun shy about investing in another proprietary engine.
That said, we can always use more game engines / frameworks!
That’s awesome! It’s been a core feature of DragonRuby since the start, and they share similar framework values from what I can tell. It’s worth a look. I’m not the biggest Lua fan, personally, so DragonRuby scratches the right itch.
I prototyped a game in a few frameworks/engines, namely: Godot, GMS, Defold, Love, and DragonRuby. I ended up sticking with DR because I found the api the most intuitive, and because I’m a career ruby dev and just can’t get myself to enjoy Lua. I find DR and Love to both be fantastic for those who just want to code.
I never was a big fan of Lua and that was something that kept me from looking closer at Löve, but a few months ago I discovered fennel (Lisp-like that transpiles to Lua) and that you can use that to write Löve games.
The "absolutely minimal Löve 2D fennel" repo was useful to me as I found the other templates a bit bloated (but possibly those are more useful for real-world projects beyond small experiments?):
I did find that startup-time was bad for Fennel om some very low-end devices, or when running even a small game using LoveDOS in DOSBox, so I set up my test-projects to pre-compile the fennel-code to Lua as part of building the .love-files and that solved that problem.
Which task? DragonRuby uses a custom mruby build to target cross platform game releases so their goal is to fit the Ruby lang spec, which Crystal does not adhere to.
I honestly thought that "ruby lang spec" was "whatever Matz ruby does." The ISO-IEC-30170 standard cited by mruby's readme seems to be laughably old but I can't obviously tell if mruby is a superset of the ISO or a subset. Their use of the phrase "part of the ISO standard" doesn't help
Matz is the creator and maintainer of Ruby, yes. mruby is a subset to my knowledge, and I don't think it's 100% parity with Ruby MRI (CRuby), which is basically what the lang spec is built around to my knowledge.
I just switched a month ago to doing gamedev in dragonruby and it's been a real positive move. Hot reloading of the script while the game is running at its current state has allowed me to debug faster and try new features or ideas (should jump be 7.5? try 7.8. maybe 7.75)
That’s one of the beautiful things about the massive Ruby ecosystem: the answer to that question is almost always yes, regardless of your need.
I’m not sure what your line of work is, but if you’re doing web dev, check this out for a great primer on the current state of things (Rails 8 + Hotwire): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cEn_83zRFw
If you’d prefer just some straight Ruby resources, Ruby Warrior is (or was, been a while since I’ve used it but it appears actively maintained still) a fun intro: https://github.com/ryanb/ruby-warrior
The reality is, we likely wouldn’t have this particular problem because we wouldn’t have Tesla. Capitalistic incentives are what drive that kind of innovation. We would, however, have a whole slew of other problems, as evidenced by historical attempts at communism.
I think humans are curious beings.I don’t think it would stifle innovation. Quite the Contrary, more effort will be spent on useful innovation rather than profit seeking.
