Just this week I got the shadow maps working in LOVR, so that at least should land into example section soon. Raytracing shouldn't be too hard to get started, just draw a full screen plane using a standard raytracing shader (but it's not well suited for VR because you cannot keep the camera steady while scene is traced). GI is way above my level.
I agree it is much harder than clicking a checkbox in Unreal/Godot. The LOVR exposes low-level OpenGL to Lua, but in a boilerplate-free way, hiding many obscure and obsolete options. This means that there is a steep learning curve, on the other hand you have power to do things differently. Not only the code architecture of project (functional and dynamic VS object-oriented and stateful), but also how you utilize the graphics card. While it can be painful and frustrating, iterating Lua with low level bindings gives you a powerful way to experiment with gfx.
I guess LOVR would mostly appeal to people who want to learn details of hardware, but don't necessary want to create (and support) another engine. LOVR is high quality readable C code and Lua API is well thought out.
I agree it is much harder than clicking a checkbox in Unreal/Godot. The LOVR exposes low-level OpenGL to Lua, but in a boilerplate-free way, hiding many obscure and obsolete options. This means that there is a steep learning curve, on the other hand you have power to do things differently. Not only the code architecture of project (functional and dynamic VS object-oriented and stateful), but also how you utilize the graphics card. While it can be painful and frustrating, iterating Lua with low level bindings gives you a powerful way to experiment with gfx.
I guess LOVR would mostly appeal to people who want to learn details of hardware, but don't necessary want to create (and support) another engine. LOVR is high quality readable C code and Lua API is well thought out.