licensing questions

[Robin]

No-one in this thread, including me, is a lawyer.

The choosalicense site is useful, if a bit simplistic. In this case, I think you'd prefer either the MIT license or a license they don't mention at all: the zlib license (which is the one LÖVE uses), which is roughly the same as the MIT license, except that the zlib license says: Altered source versions must not be misrepresented as being the original software, which may or may not be a restriction you want.

Licensing code is usually done to allow/disallow the reuse of libs.

No.

I think you're talking about an EULA (End-user license agreement).

No.

Also, if your game has graphics/sound effects or other assets these need to be addressed in addition to the code.

It can, but doesn't have to be.

You can compile your code to Lua bytecode if you don't want anybody to read or modify it (I usually do it to hide how terrible my code is!)

How?

With luac, please don't use it unless you know what you're doing.

Looking at this http://stackoverflow.com/a/1351316 it seems that GPL and the likes are actually EULA.

No, they are not. They are software licenses.

[slime]

http://www.tldrlegal.com can be helpful as well (although the fact that it has simple explanations for licenses means some details of the license might get left out.)

With luac, please don't use it unless you know what you're doing.

In particular, the code generated by Luac and string.dump and friends is not portable between Lua versions (e.g. between a version of LÖVE running Lua 5.1 and a version of LÖVE running LuaJIT), and for regular Lua's bytecode it's not portable between architectures (32 bit versus 64 bit.)
You definitely need to know what you're doing if you want to use Lua bytecode properly.

https://love2d.org/wiki/LuaC

[Helvecta]

You definitely need to know what you're doing if you want to use Lua bytecode properly.

How can luac be used improperly? After reading the wiki page, it seems that the only danger in obfuscating the files is that the output may only work with the exact version of lua and exact build of LOVE that you're currently using, which would generally be the versions that you release your application with anyways..

Why so much hate for luac?

[slime]

After reading the wiki page, it seems that the only danger in obfuscating the files is that the output may only work with the exact version of lua and exact build of LOVE that you're currently using, which would generally be the versions that you release your application with anyways..

For Linux, you generally don't distribute LÖVE or Lua directly with your game (and if you do it's a PITA, I don't recommend it.) So you might not be able to rely on one particular architecture or Lua version being used.

For OS X, LÖVE 0.8.0 is a 'universal binary' which loads either its 32 bit or 64 bit version depending on what the CPU supports - so you can't rely on a particular architecture there either, unless you explicitly strip out the one you don't want.
The official build of LÖVE 0.9.0 for OS X will be 64-bit only (as well as using LuaJIT by default.)

And this is only talking about distributing a game to people who don't have LÖVE already. If they try to run it with their own version of LÖVE, they could be using whatever Lua version built for whatever architecture.
The difference between 0.8.0 and 0.9.0 is also important - 0.8.0 uses Lua 5.1 by default, but official builds of 0.9.0 will use LuaJIT by default when possible.

To sum it all up, you really have to know what you're doing when using bytecode-compiled Lua.

[pielago]

true how you do it?
teach please or at least example

[veethree]

Somewhat off topic, what is the standard way to distribute for Linux? I was thinking I'd just provide a .love file and instructions on how to install the love framework. Is there any way to build a file that would run on the most common distros? (Ubuntu, arch, mint etc.)

And another unrelated question, are there any estimates on when 0.9.0 will be released? Is it worth it to start using nightly builds by default yet or are there going to be any major syntax changes etc. Still?

Sorry for getting off topic.

[Roland_Yonaba]

And another unrelated question, are there any estimates on when 0.9.0 will be released? Is it worth it to start using nightly builds by default yet or are there going to be any major syntax changes etc. Still?

Any estimate for Löve 0.9.0 ?

[BozoDel]

Somewhat off topic, what is the standard way to distribute for Linux? I was thinking I'd just provide a .love file and instructions on how to install the love framework. Is there any way to build a file that would run on the most common distros? (Ubuntu, arch, mint etc.)

Yep, the .love file. There's been a lot of discussion on that, and people always get to that conclusion. josefnpat managed to make .deb files, but they still require LÖVE to run anyways.

[bartbes]

I'd say the "proper" way is to create a package for the relevant package manager, depending on the love package, and then distributing a script and/or desktop file to run love on your game. Alternatively, if a script is too much of a hassle, or you're going for the cool factor, you can prefix your .love with the line:

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/love

or similar (use the --release option when using 0.9.0 or later) and make it executable.