[HELP] .love --> .exe

[Robin]

Hm...I just thought of something. I think I'm going to create a package manager for LOVE games. I'm going to call it "LovePKG".

You mean like LÖVE ME?

[Luiji]

LOVE what?

[Jasoco]

The Mac version is so easy. Someone made it dead simple.

First you take a fresh copy of the love.app. Rename it to whatever you want the game to be called. Then open it in the Finder by right-clicking and choosing "Show Package Contents". Then just navigate to /Contents/Resources/ and place the .love file in there. When you run the app, it will load that file instead of sitting at a "no game" screen.

You can also change the icon file in there if you want. It's easy. If you have a Mac using friend, they can do it for you. Heck, I'm sure if you main the .love to one of us we could make it for you and upload it somewhere if you get to the point you need it ready for release.

As for the Linux version, I don't know how it works there. Someone here probably knows.

[Luiji]

As someone listed above, it makes the Mac way look complex.

From the command-line, run:

Code: Select all

$ cat love my.love > mygame

I wonder if you can open .apps with File Roller or 7-zip, at which point we wouldn't need Macs. Yay!

[TechnoCat]

I believe app files are just renamed folders.

[Jasoco]

That's what I said. Mac APP's are just folders with files. They're not ZIP files. They're a folder with an extension. They're packages. There is no "cat"ing to do. No file merging. Luiji is just trying to make Mac's seem harder than they are. (And apparently trying to troll at the same time. Stop it! Make löve, not OS wars.)

The .love file goes inside the Resources folder. The Mac version of Löve is set up to automatically load whatever .love file is inside that folder if none is passed to it. So you can make a duplicate copy of the Love.app and throw your .love project inside and use it. That is the Mac equivalent to "cat"ing the two files together. Easy-peasy simple as pie. Simply send the .love file to a friend you know that has a Mac with OS X and tell him/her what to do. (If your friends are clueless, just send it to one of us.)

I think someone actually created a drag and drop script to merge the two "pieces" together once. I could probably make one too. Where you drag the love.app and the .love file onto the script, it makes a copy of the love.app, moves the .love file inside and places it on the desktop for you. Probably easy as pie. Or cake.

Using this method for the Mac and the Cat method for Windows, and whatever method for Linux, one could have three cross-platform versions of their game ready in mere minutes.

The main difference being that the Mac version is drag and drop to "install". The Windows version would need an installer to place all the libraries where they go. The Mac version has all the needed libraries (Also known as Frameworks) right inside the .app package so it's a stand-alone file that requires no dependencies. (Inside the Frameworks folder is all the stuff Löve uses. FreeType, IL, Vorbis, SDL, mpg123, physfs, libmodplug, Lua, Ogg.)

[bartbes]

Some clarification as to why the windows version has separate dlls: licensing issues.

[Luiji]

I didn't mean to "troll Macs or make them see harder", I simply find a single command easier then navigating some folders. No trolling intended.

Also, I've been in OS wars, they're not pretty, so I try as hard as I can to avoid them.

[Jasoco]

Some clarification as to why the windows version has separate dlls: licensing issues.

Do the license issues not exist on the Mac side? Or does the Mac version use special less licensed versions of the frameworks?

[bmelts]

Do the license issues not exist on the Mac side? Or does the Mac version use special less licensed versions of the frameworks?

I'm pretty sure the licensing issues bartbes is referring to are various provisions like that of the LGPL license, which state that, as one option to follow the terms of the license, one must link an LGPL'd library at runtime, to allow the user to swap in their own version if they so desire (see section 4d1 of LGPL 3, or 6b of LGPL 2.1). A DLL - Dynamic Link Library - does just that, which is why the DLLs are separate in the Windows version instead of being compiled into the LÖVE binary.

Conveniently enough, the standard method for including libraries with Mac OS X applications - frameworks - does that as well. A .framework is just a folder with a particular structure and, at its heart, a (usually extensionless) .dylib file - a dynamic library. The user is free to take their own version of SDL.framework, or FreeType.framework, or Ogg.framework, or any of the other libraries LÖVE uses, and swap their own in for the ones included with love.app. Thus, as a Combined Work, LÖVE satisfies the requirements of the LGPL to link a shared library file instead of a static library file. Legal issues averted. (Of course, we also have all the source code readily available.)

IANAL, of course, and I could be misinterpreting the LGPL horribly and thus about to bring the FSF's hammer down on this little project. Or I could be wrong about the license issues bartbes is talking about, and the Mac version has actually been in violation of a library's license this whole time (though I have done a bit of research to try and make sure this is not the case). In short, though, to the best of my knowledge, the Mac version pays heed to all relevant licensing terms for the libraries it uses. (So do the other versions!)