LÖVE-Packer: packaging made simple

[Tesselode]

I don't know if it means anything to you, but I don't mind the large file size. 60MB is just not that much nowadays.

[Beelz]

I don't know if it means anything to you, but I don't mind the large file size. 60MB is just not that much nowadays.

But it really is... For something with such a limited usage, that's quite high. For comparison, Tiled is 59MB.

[NightKawata]

I don't know if it means anything to you, but I don't mind the large file size. 60MB is just not that much nowadays.

On one hand, it's no longer 1992, and 60MB isn't a behemoth of filespace.
On another hand, there is the scope issue of "this app does like 2 things why is it 60MB."
On this other hand over here (hi greg), those with less fortunate internet speeds probably won't love that very much. Nor would they love much of anything.

But of course, 60MB is a little bit silly for what the use case is, but it's nowhere near as unreasonable as per se, 500MB. If this thing becomes 500MB I'm calling the police. It's kinda like "it's not great, but it could be worse"

[Nixola]

When a thing weighs 60MB and "does like 2 things", you most likely either used the wrong tool or "misused" it.
Then of course if installing just libraries and runtimes on Windows once, so that you wouldn't need to ship everything when you make stuff with them, was an actual thing, we wouldn't be talking about this I guess.

[zorg]

The fact that memory and storage space is increasing should not mean that people actually want their programs to also scale in used memory / taken up space. I have 32 GB of RAM, and Chrome usually maxes it out, so yeah...

[Ulydev]

OK guys, I got it. 60mb is too large. But I can't do anything against it, that's the size of Electron itself.

[alberto_lara]

I've thought about this many times and in the end it always comes down to the more exotic platforms like iOS and Android. The standard platforms are easily achieveable, which is why there are ~10 tools, which can pack you exactly that. But the is no good solution for iOS and I'm not sure about Android. The best way would be a serverside solution which takes care of the heavy lifting and a local sync client. The server itself could add Platforms in a addon kind of way and just send the packed solutions back to the client

You're right. An offline tool would always require the user to download the iOS and Android SDKs, which are very heavy. I'm currently porting this tool to an online solution that will handle this server-side.

You're right, but if somebody is planning to release a game for Android/iOS, then is very likely they already have the SDK's and the necessary stuff (adb, ant, etc), so an offline tool (at least as a secondary option) seems like something nice, we would just need to set some directories and puff! ready to pack

[Jack5500]

You're right, but if somebody is planning to release a game for Android/iOS, then is very likely they already have the SDK's and the necessary stuff (adb, ant, etc), so an offline tool (at least as a secondary option) seems like something nice, we would just need to set some directories and puff! ready to pack

For android that might be true, but for iOS it's not that simple, since there is afaik no way to build an iOs App from a Windows PC. I also don't know about Android from linux. A serverside solution makes it "simple" to abstract all that away to a simple download.

[alberto_lara]

You're right, but if somebody is planning to release a game for Android/iOS, then is very likely they already have the SDK's and the necessary stuff (adb, ant, etc), so an offline tool (at least as a secondary option) seems like something nice, we would just need to set some directories and puff! ready to pack

For android that might be true, but for iOS it's not that simple, since there is afaik no way to build an iOs App from a Windows PC. I also don't know about Android from linux. A serverside solution makes it "simple" to abstract all that away to a simple download.

Yup, I know about iOS limitations, that's why I'm suggesting this as a secondary option, something light, portable and requiring no internet connection. Android from linux, as you say, is not really different from the other 2 OS's.

[Jack5500]

I see possibilities in both approaches. The client-side one could be easily achieved.
*shameless plug* https://github.com/JanWerder/LoveAutoComp does most of this already, so adding Android there would be a rather simple task. The whole iOS thing is very nebulous for me. How do normal App developers do this? Is there a Server you can rent somewhere just for this purpose?