Game Loop

Start

To start off you need to install LÖVE on your system and then figure out how to run LÖVE projects. The LÖVE version we'll be using is 0.10.2 and it can be downloaded here. If you're in the future and a new version of LÖVE has been released you can get 0.10.2 here. You can follow the steps from this page for further details. Once that's done you should create a main.lua file in your project folder with the following contents:

function love.load()

end

function love.update(dt)

end

function love.draw()

end

If you run this you should see a window popup and it should show a black screen. In the code above, once your LÖVE project is run the love.load function is run once at the start of the program and love.update and love.draw are run every frame. So, for instance, if you wanted to load an image and draw it, you'd do something like this:

function love.load()
    image = love.graphics.newImage('image.png')
end

function love.update(dt)

end

function love.draw()
    love.graphics.draw(image, 0, 0)
end

love.graphics.newImage loads the image texture to the image variable and then every frame it's drawn at position 0, 0. To see that love.draw actually draws the image on every frame, try this:

love.graphics.draw(image, love.math.random(0, 800), love.math.random(0, 600))

The default size of the window is 800x600, so what this should do is randomly draw the image around the screen really fast:

Note that between every frame the screen is cleared, otherwise the image you're drawing randomly would slowly fill the entire screen as it is drawn in random positions. This happens because LÖVE provides a default game loop for its projects that clears the screen at the end of every frame. I'll go over this game loop and how you can change it now.

Game Loop

The default game loop LÖVE uses can be found in the love.run page, and it looks like this:

function love.run()
    if love.math then
    love.math.setRandomSeed(os.time())
    end

    if love.load then love.load(arg) end

    -- We don't want the first frame's dt to include time taken by love.load.
    if love.timer then love.timer.step() end

    local dt = 0

    -- Main loop time.
    while true do
        -- Process events.
        if love.event then
    love.event.pump()
    for name, a,b,c,d,e,f in love.event.poll() do
        if name == "quit" then
    if not love.quit or not love.quit() then
        return a
    end
        end
    love.handlers[name](a,b,c,d,e,f)
    end
    end

    -- Update dt, as we'll be passing it to update
    if love.timer then
        love.timer.step()
        dt = love.timer.getDelta()
    end

    -- Call update and draw
    if love.update then love.update(dt) end -- will pass 0 if love.timer is disabled

    if love.graphics and love.graphics.isActive() then
        love.graphics.clear(love.graphics.getBackgroundColor())
        love.graphics.origin()
                if love.draw then love.draw() end
        love.graphics.present()
    end

    if love.timer then love.timer.sleep(0.001) end
    end
end

When the program starts love.run is run and then from there everything happens. The function is fairly well commented and you can find out what each function does on the LÖVE wiki. But I'll go over the basics:

if love.math then
    love.math.setRandomSeed(os.time())
end

In the first line we're checking to see if love.math is not nil. In Lua all values are true, except for false and nil, so the if love.math condition will be true if love.math is defined as anything at all. In the case of LÖVE these variables are set to be enabled or not in the conf.lua file. You don't need to worry about this file for now, but I'm just mentioning it because it's in that file that you can enable or disable individual systems like love.math, and so that's why there's a check to see if it's enabled or not before anything is done with one of its functions.

In general, if a variable is not defined in Lua and you refer to it in any way, it will return a nil value. So if you ask if random_variable then this will be false unless you defined it before, like random_variable = 1.

In any case, if the love.math module is enabled (which it is by default) then its seed is set based on the current time. See love.math.setRandomSeed and os.time. After doing this, the love.load function is called:

if love.load then love.load(arg) end

arg are the command line arguments passed to the LÖVE executable when it runs the project. And as you can see, the reason why love.load only runs once is because it's only called once, while the update and draw functions are called multiple times inside a loop (and each iteration of that loop corresponds to a frame).

-- We don't want the first frame's dt to include time taken by love.load.
if love.timer then love.timer.step() end

local dt = 0

After calling love.load and after that function does all its work, we verify that love.timer is defined and call love.timer.step, which measures the time taken between the two last frames. As the comment explains, love.load might take a long time to process (because it might load all sorts of things like images and sounds) and that time shouldn't be the first thing returned by love.timer.getDelta on the first frame of the game.

dt is also initialized to 0 here. Variables in Lua are global by default, so by saying local dt it's being defined only to the local scope of the current block, which in this case is the love.run function. See more on blocks here.

-- Main loop time.
while true do
    -- Process events.
    if love.event then
        love.event.pump()
        for name, a,b,c,d,e,f in love.event.poll() do
            if name == "quit" then
                if not love.quit or not love.quit() then
                    return a
                end
            end
            love.handlers[name](a,b,c,d,e,f)
        end
    end
end

This is where the main loop starts. The first thing that is done on each frame is the processing of events. love.event.pump pushes events to the event queue and according to its description those events are generated by the user in some way, so think key presses, mouse clicks, window resizes, window focus lost/gained and stuff like that. The loop using love.event.poll goes over the event queue and handles each event. love.handlers is a table of functions that calls the relevant callbacks. So, for instance, love.handlers.quit will call the love.quit function if it exists.

One of the things about LÖVE is that you can define callbacks in the main.lua file that will get called when an event happens. A full list of all callbacks is available here. I'll go over callbacks in more detail later, but this is how all that happens. The a, b, c, d, e, f arguments you can see passed to love.handlers[name] are all the possible arguments that can be used by the relevant functions. For instance, love.keypressed receives as arguments the key pressed, its scancode and if the key press event is a repeat. So in the case of love.keypressed the a, b, c values would be defined as something while d, e, f would be nil.

-- Update dt, as we'll be passing it to update
if love.timer then
    love.timer.step()
    dt = love.timer.getDelta()
end

-- Call update and draw
if love.update then love.update(dt) end -- will pass 0 if love.timer is disabled

love.timer.step measures the time between the two last frames and changes the value returned by love.timer.getDelta. So in this case dt will contain the time taken for the last frame to run. This is useful because then this value is passed to the love.update function, and from there it can be used in the game to define things with constant speeds, despite frame rate changes.

if love.graphics and love.graphics.isActive() then
    love.graphics.clear(love.graphics.getBackgroundColor())
    love.graphics.origin()
    if love.draw then love.draw() end
    love.graphics.present()
end

After calling love.update, love.draw is called. But before that we verify that the love.graphics module exists and that we can draw to the screen via love.graphics.isActive. The screen is cleared to the defined background color (initially black) via love.graphics.clear, transformations are reset via love.graphics.origin, love.draw is finally called and then love.graphics.present is used to push everything drawn in love.draw to the screen. And then finally:

if love.timer then love.timer.sleep(0.001) end

I never understood why love.timer.sleep needs to be here at the end of the frame, but the explanation given by a LÖVE developer here seems reasonable enough.

And with that the love.run function ends. Everything that happens inside the while true loop is referred to as a frame, which means that love.update and love.draw are called once per frame. The entire game is basically repeating the contents of that loop really fast (like at 60 frames per second), so get used to that idea. I remember when I was starting it took me a while to get an instinctive handle on how this worked for some reason.

There's a helpful discussion on this function on the LÖVE forums if you want to read more about it.

Anyway, if you don't want to you don't need to understand all of this at the start, but it's helpful to be somewhat comfortable with editing how your game loop works and to figure out how you want it to work exactly. There's an excellent article that goes over different game loop techniques and does a good job of explaining each. You can find it here.

Game Loop Exercises

1. What is the role that Vsync plays in the game loop? It is enabled by default and you can disable it by calling love.window.setMode with the vsync attribute set to false.
2. Implement the Fixed Delta Time loop from the Fix Your Timestep article by changing love.run.
3. Implement the Variable Delta Time loop from the Fix Your Timestep article by changing love.run.
4. Implement the Semi-Fixed Timestep loop from the Fix Your Timestep article by changing love.run.
5. Implement the Free the Physics loop from the Fix Your Timestep article by changing love.run.