LÖVE on Android?

[kalle2990]

Yay
Would be totally awesome with lua games on phones, haven't really been able to create anyone yet since I can't do Java...

[TechnoCat]

So, all this time I was learning android platform and can say that porting is sufficiently easy.
Now I'm writing my own opengl native game for android, after that I'm planing to start porting LOVE.

Wow, really good to hear! Which phone are you targeting?

[kalle2990]

Are you using this to get Lua for Android?
http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/

Thought it might be a bit useful, if you haven't already seen it. Seems like it has quite many built in functions for making stuff happen using functions.

android.getInput("Hello!", "What is your name?")

[kalle2990]

Wow, really good to hear! Which phone are you targeting?

I also want to know what phone you are targeting, or maybe it will work for all of them?

[Jasoco]

I just got an iPod touch and more than ever I want a way to make LÖVE games for it. Even if it's targeted at the Jailbreak community only. All we need is a LÖVE engine runtime that works on the iPhone OS and a way to put our .love files with it. Then special multi-touch input detecting for the input. Stuff like JavaScript has touchStart, touchEnd, touchMove, touchCancel, etc...

It would be a hobbyist's language, but it'd be a heck of a lot cooler programming in super-fast Löve than slow as heck JavaScript, even if JS on the iPhone is a bit faster now. It's still no Löve. Forget Apple and the App Store, Löve is best as a hobby, so just aim for the niche market that does non-approved apps. Heck, you could probably eventually put your iPhone Löve app on Cydia Store or something if you wanted to.

Yeah, I brought it up again.

[bartbes]

You might want to talk to anjo, as he's in charge of the OSX port.

[Jasoco]

I don't know if he'd really want to bother making something for the iPhone even if it does use the same language especially since he'd have to put up with making it work on jailbroken devices and somehow make a way to include the .love file with the Löve engine in one bundle that still works on the iPhone using its native .ipa (iPhone App) extension since the ipa's are single files, not bundles. (Though they might be zipped bundles now that I think of it. Like .love files.)

I'd help myself if I could.

[bartbes]

IIRC I recently heard of a way of not having to port code, but it might have been another platform..

[Jasoco]

Is the Mac version of LÖVE done in Cocoa? If so, it would be portable. As long as all its libraries are also Cocoa.

[bmelts]

Is the Mac version of LÖVE done in Cocoa?

Sort of.

LÖVE itself is C++ based around cross-platform libraries written in C/C++ such as SDL (which does have some Objective-C code in the Mac version), OpenGL, and DevIL. That doesn't change on the Mac. By necessity, however, the Mac LÖVE app itself uses some Objective-C – a small Cocoa entry point that handles actually starting everything up and interfacing with OS X, since SDL can't manage that on its own. (Namely, SDLMain.m.)

This is nominally a thread about LÖVE on Android, but I'll make a last statement about porting LÖVE to the iPhone - it would suck to do. SDL 1.3, which should come out sometime before the heat death of the universe, has built-in support for the iPhone and iPod touch, so that's the single-biggest hurdle dealt with. But as far as I know, only one of the other libraries we use has an iPhone version (not counting OpenGL, since the version on the iPhone is much more limited than the desktop version and would require a major amount of rewritten code). We would need to either start/contribute to porting efforts for the above libraries, or ditch them and write the necessary libraries ourselves. And that would take approximately forever.

Even if we get LÖVE completely working, with feature parity with the desktop version, accelerometer support, etc., there's still the issue of that annoying clause in Apple's App Store terms that disallows executing any external code. People would not be able to just download the LÖVE app from the App Store and then play .love files on them - every .love file would have to be turned into its own separate iPhone app and submitted to the App Store separately. That means that porting a game to the iPhone would cost at least $99 (for the first game anyway, once you've paid the fee you can port as many as you like).

There's the option of going jailbreak-only, obviously, which would simultaneously solve the "no external code" issue and the "$99" issue. I'm not a huge fan of jailbreaking personally, but that's something that can be considered. I would argue, however, that that decision is moot, since the effort to port LÖVE to the iPhone would be highly non-trivial, and much better spent improving the engine itself.

Back to Android discussion, hopefully!