Distributing your games (making a .love file)

[bartbes]

Speed differences mostly happens when you don't use dt, and what I posted would run the game, notice the dot on the end? That specifies the path, I see no reason for microsoft not to implementing ., but of course they are pretty lame. (let the flame war.. stop, I can edit posts )

[Divran]

I am using dt, and I'll try that path thing tomorrow.

[Divran]

I was thinking I might be able to create a shortcut to love.exe, and add something to the "target" line to run my game, but I don't know what to add.[/quote
Run love as

Code: Select all

C:\Path\to\love\ C:\Path\to\game\

(example)

This one worked. Great, thanks!

[Slow]

Hello,guys. I have a little problem with LOVE. My game works fine, when starts from main.lua. But when I start .love file LOVE says "can't find file levels/1.lua". Ok, I can add this dir in .love, but I want a simple case for user to add new levels. So I want to work with real filesystem, but not with .love filesystem with love.filesystem. Can I do this?

[Robin]

Hi Slow, I see you're stuck here too. (The forum split in two, oddly enough, this is the "dead" side.)

To answer your question: you will want to use the so-called "write directory", which is a certain directory, writeable for the user, that LÖVE can write to. Under Linux, this is ~/.love/*YOURGAME*, for Windows it's somewhere in AppData IIRC, for Mac I'm not sure.

The neat thing about the write dir is that you don't have to do anything different if you want to load from write dir instead of .love.

It is adviced to put love.filesystem.setIdentity("gamename") at the top of your main.lua, so you get the right folder even when LÖVE is invoked as "love ."

[Luiji]

Quick random thought that probably doesn't deserve a topic: should the "identity" by within "conf.lua"?

[bartbes]

Ehm.. I see we have yet to get the issue tracker back, but as soon as we do, you should add it (to the feature tracker).

[BAZ]

I don't know if this is actually useful to anyone (It's probably been done a thousand times before) but I wrote a personal batch file for making exe's and .love files automatically (It uses 7zips stand alone command line tool, included). It's not very pretty since it was for personal use. I'll upload it since some of you seem to be after one.





DOWNLOAD

If you have any problems with it feel free to PM me.

[jennsand]

I'm a Windows user and I've been able to package up my game very well for Windows systems. But I want to create a Mac version as well (and Linux if it's not too much trouble) . So I've attempted going around to friends houses to use their Macs to create a distributable version, but haven't had much luck.

So I was wondering, is it possible to create a Mac version in Windows somehow?

Assuming that's not possible... I think I'm having two main problems when I try to get my game to work on a Mac. Firstly, I started by downloading the Mac version of LOVE onto my friend's Mac and then tried to run my game. In my game I use love.filesystem to save high scores and do a few other file related things, e.g. mkdir. When I quit the game and do a search in Finder for the files and folders I should have created in the game, they don't exist. I tried looking for the /Library/Application Support/LOVE/ folder that Love is supposed to create somehow when I download the .dmg (yes, I'm not a Mac user and I'm confused by how this works), and the entire folder doesn't exist. It's like it never creates the application directory, which is why my game fails?

But... Even ignoring these filesystem errors, I can't seem to make head nor tail of the instructions on the game distribution page on the wiki and the ones posted here. It says I should right click on the love.app file. But I can't find that. Is it somehow within the .dmg file? If I copy the .dmg file to the Applications directory, shouldn't it kind of unpackage itself or something and show the "love.app" file so I can right click it? I've tried on two different friends' Macs and love just seems stuck as a .dmg and when I right click I don't get any options to unpackage it or anything.

Any help would be much appreciated! Thanks.

[bartbes]

First I must ask, why create binaries?
Then, as a non-mac user I can only advice you on stuff I've heard. From what I understand the dmg actually is an installer and love.app is located in /Applications.
Then about the saved files, can love load them?