Making games standalone from LOVE?

[conman420]

I've started making a few games and I was just wondering will LOVE ever support 'compiled' games? Where to run it you do not require the love engine installed on the system it will run straight from the love file?

I'm sorry if love already supports this but I haven't seen anything to show this

Thanks.

never mind missed this thread:

http://love2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=89

[SnakeFace]

I second this!

[rude]

I implemented this a few days ago. You'll be able to merge love.exe and yourgame.love into yourgame.exe. When the love.exe is run under a different filename, it will try to load itself. This does not mean that there only will be one .exe, though. You'll still need to distribute the DLLs LÖVE needs in addition to yourgame.exe.

This will be available in version 0.5.0 (next).

[conman420]

Awesome

[sauer2]

This will be available in version 0.5.0 (next).

Also for other platforms than windows?

[emonk]

The zip archive format allows for having a zip file appended to a stub executable for making self-extracting zip executables. I've seen plenty of variations on this theme for windows, but don't know of many instances of it on other platforms. So single-file distribution of Love is a matter of appending a copy of your game.love to love.exe to produce game.exe. As rude pointed out however you'll still need the shared libs that Love.exe depends on.

That doesn't mean that there can't be Love sfx executables for each platform though. So long as there is some way to bind a zip file to an executable image without stopping it from functioning as an executable, this should be possible. I know nothing about the binary form of non-win32 executables, so I can't make predictions, but I don't imagine that it's impossible. It might take some binary patching of the exe header on some platforms perhaps, but most likely it'll be fine.

The problem of course is that each platform has a different executable format, and no two are enough alike (or enough different for that matter) to allow for a single redistributable. So a cross-platform version is pretty much out... unless we wrap multiple executable types with a java stub perhaps?

rude: could you perhaps do runtime linking against the DLLs and extract them from the game.exe if required? Takes a bit more work, I know.

[surtic]

Speaking of 0.5.0, how about that love.graphics.newImage(rgba_buffer, width, height)?

... Just asking

[Green_Hell]

You'll still need to distribute the DLLs LÖVE needs in addition to yourgame.exe

Does it make any sense then?

No offence

I know it's possible to do it multi platform and so that anything can be included. See http://love2d.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f ... t=20#p1144

[bartbes]

I think DLL distributing is not a problem, as the main goal for the exe's is to allow people to just download the game instead of engine + game.

It's normal for games and even all other programs to have DLL's.
And that's just windows, I haven't seen any linux program which doesn't need libs (not including libc, ld, etc).
Don't know about mac, but there isn't even a mac version.