LÖVR -- The Easiest 3D Game Engine?

LocalThunk should make a Balatro VR version with this!

Can you make your OWN toolings and GUI with lovr?

NO. JUST NO. I've spent serious time in pico8, love2d, and solar2d. And lesser time in defold. All of these are lua engines. Love2d was by far the worst of the lot. It is not viable whatsoever as a serious game engine. It is a quirky hobbyist and tutorial engine, that's it. You can learn things from it (I did), but do not use it past that point. If you want to rewrite love2d into your own personal version then you may consider it seriously (this is a huge time sink that requires ALOT of existing knowledge). But the default releases are bull. They are unoptimized messes, they run terrible on older hardware (the whole point of a 2d engine). It doesn't have a web player, it has a BROKEN fan made web player....I know firsthand the amount of BULL work u have to do REWRITING your game to use the correct version of the same functions cause there are multiple versions of functions and one if not both WILL BE BROKEN in the web version and then GOOD LUCK.
YOU DO NOT WANT TO CHOOse a game engine where u waste ur time on this kind of stuff. I learnt that lesson in grueling fashion from pico8 (by far the best lua engine) where 2/3 of my time was spent rewriting code instead of making it.

I have nothing but contempt for the love2d community for a very simple reason....95% OF THESE PEOPLE HAVE NEVER MADE A SINGLE GAME IN THE ENGINE. Just go into a chat room and ask them for examples of games in the engine, absolute silence. You'll get absolute silence. It's basically the gamedev reddit, that's the community.....they all pretend to be novelists but none of them has written a book. They waste their time being Brian from family guy, all for the gloating. If you are googling anything about the engine you will find threads of Brians. B4 you spend any time in an engine, play the games made with it. The only game a few years ago was this rail shooter that was pretty fun...but not great...and it had collision problems I was noticing....after using the engine I figured out why it had those problem. That's what I mean, u can learn alot from the games made in an engine. Since then there's been like 2 new games....some party game and for some god forsaken reason balatro. So 3 games total. If u want to count the gotchya filler games u'll find on the website I have nothing to say to you, go ahead and use love2d you dummy ur not even worth me using manners on go waste urself proving me wrong.

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

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

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

i guess its a engine from sweden Ø

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

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

i wish lua had an editor like godot.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

Could be pretty neat with something like TypescriptToLua if you dislike Lua.

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?

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.

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.

Any games with example code? Even something simple would be instructive.

Last time I tried LOVR the PC/Non-VR support wasn't very good. Has that been mostly matured? I like the syntax but VR is last on my list lol

WMR lives on over here on Linux! Completely reverse engineered on a foss openxr runtime :)

Alot of squiggles appear in your editor, doesn't that bother you?

wait what??? love 3d?? that's insane

From now on, I'll be refering to "umlauts" as "omelets". Thank you!

Happy to see people being exposed to far more ergonomic languages such as Lua.

Love2D is capable of 3d you have lots of graphical control. That’s not to say lovr isn’t a better choice for 3d.

As a software developer you probably should know at least one scripting language, be it Python, JS, or Lua. As a game dev, you have to know Lua which might be the most popular programming language 20 years from now (thanks to Roblox).

Non-compiled language = non-starter.

Lua is on my language for 2025 list, pretty easy to get started, defold, löve and now lövr all are pretty neat

It's too bad that Lua and Python both have some significant design flaws. Both are popular and widely supported languages with some good libraries but have fundamental flaws that are dealbreakers for me. Python has moronic enforced whitespace for code scope and some issues with its syntax that I don't care for. Lua has similar syntax issues and the complete dealbreaker that is 1-based array indices when literally every other language uses 0-based indices. Both also have some issues with performance compared to languages like C and C++ but I can't really complain about that when I use Javascript which is worse in most cases when it comes to performance, lol.

This is incredible

Roblox uses a modified version of lua to do 2d and 3d game development

Ultraleap a.k.a Leap motion controller

Excited for LÖVIER, the next iteration which adds the fourth dimension; smellovision

WELL, guess I need to start learning pico-8. Then go up to picotron, then LOVE, then LOVR.
Sounds like a good learning curve. I don't know a lot about coding or code logic, but I can try.

This would be crazy, if LOVR can handle giving us a smoother VR experience as a developer than Unreal Engine 5. And I have a funny feeling that it most certainly will.

Is it just IK or does it support FK too?

No hot reload? Do you need to drag main.lua onto lovr.exe everytime you wanna see an update?

iOS support 😢

You should also cover love-DPBR, a library for LOVR for PBR

Is there any video tutorial because i'm more of a visual learner?

A VR game engine where 100% of everything is typing.... 😂 What am I missing here? Is there a GUI or does every single thing have to be coded?

GDevelop just went full 3D physics - you sure DOS prompt/Lua code is easier than visual code and WYSIWYG interface?