State of the attempt to natively port love to android

[Moe]

Short project update: I took some hours and fixed the building stuff, so check "license issues solved".
Next steps: fix controls, reactivate back button (I really hate things I cannot exit ), fix black screen after returning to the app, add love-file selection screen. Minor bug fixes.
Stay tuned, the market version will follow when we have a file selection.

Yes, we port the engine, as far as I know the Java reimplementation is inactive. Well, one port is enough.
All those portions we did (like changing GL->GLES) should help with an iOS port.

[miko]

Stay tuned, the market version will follow when we have a file selection.

Great! Do you have any *.apk available right now to test before publishing in the market?

Yes, we port the engine, as far as I know the Java reimplementation is inactive. Well, one port is enough.
All those portions we did (like changing GL->GLES) should help with an iOS port.

So are those changes going to be backported to the original code? Or will there be a code merge?
Btw, you are still at 0.7.2, right?

[bartbes]

So are those changes going to be backported to the original code? Or will there be a code merge?

Depends on whether it's version 1 or 2 of GLES, or at least, that's what anjo always says.

[SiENcE]

Short project update: I took some hours and fixed the building stuff, so check "license issues solved".
Next steps: fix controls, reactivate back button (I really hate things I cannot exit ), fix black screen after returning to the app, add love-file selection screen. Minor bug fixes.
Stay tuned, the market version will follow when we have a file selection.

Hey Moe,

is it possible to make a standalone builds using love-nativ-android? I mean adding a game to love runtime and distribution this package to Android store without building love-nativ-android myself?

cheers

[T-Bone]

Short project update: I took some hours and fixed the building stuff, so check "license issues solved".
Next steps: fix controls, reactivate back button (I really hate things I cannot exit ), fix black screen after returning to the app, add love-file selection screen. Minor bug fixes.
Stay tuned, the market version will follow when we have a file selection.

Hey Moe,

is it possible to make a standalone builds using love-nativ-android? I mean adding a game to love runtime and distribution this package to Android store without building love-nativ-android myself?

cheers

I have the same question except I am willing to build love-native-android myself, as I obviously want to build the actual app myself.

Of course, if you were to release love-native-android as a package that can simply be imported in an Eclipse Android project (like for example libgdx does it), that would be the best solution.

Also, when you say

Short project update: I took some hours and fixed the building stuff, so check "license issues solved".
Next steps: fix controls, reactivate back button (I really hate things I cannot exit ), fix black screen after returning to the app, add love-file selection screen. Minor bug fixes.
Stay tuned, the market version will follow when we have a file selection.

Yes, we port the engine, as far as I know the Java reimplementation is inactive. Well, one port is enough.
All those portions we did (like changing GL->GLES) should help with an iOS port.

what/where are you referring to? Or do you mean to simply say that the issues are solved? If so, yay Can't wait for an apk to test my game.

[tsturzl]

problem is lua is MIT license. I'm no lawyer but I don't believe static linking will work for this either

And you are wrong, static linking is exactly what the windows build does, too.

Also, you might want to keep in mind it's way less of an effort for iOS, since it's easier to build C++ code. The real problem would be backends, one of which, GLES, is probably already tackled by this project, and anjo did some work on the others as well. Furthermore, the current state of this project seems not to be reimplementing the engine, but actually porting it.

From my understanding its not a technical problem, and yes you could do this. The problem is more on the legal side.

If you release the engine statically linked and you embed the script into the engine when you distribute it, you're now distributing the engine and the game as one. Doesn't this mean your game must comply with the engine license now? This would be a pretty shitty way to distribute an engine. Just because its an opensource engine doesn't mean we shouldn't allow commercial/indie licenses, or other opensource licenses to be used for distributing the game.

Again, I could be wrong. I'm not a lawyer, and far from one.

[MarekkPie]

I think you are confusing MIT with GPL. While both are free software licenses, MIT is permissive. From my understanding, this would mean that the engine is free software, but the game does not have to be, and therefore you can be as stringent with that portion as you want.

Lua is MIT licensed. No one is claiming that we can't sell software coded in Lua.

[bartbes]

LÖVE's license is perhaps more interesting in this case, but that's zlib, also one of the most permissive licenses around. On the other hand, we do make use of libraries like SDL, OpenAL, DevIL and mpg123, which are LGPL-licensed, meaning they can't be linked statically. (SDL 1.3 is supposedly going to have a permissive license as well, but then again, it's been scheduled for simultaneous release with love 1.0.)

[Moe]

Great! Do you have any *.apk available right now to test before publishing in the market?

Check http://www.brightidea.eu/games/love-native-android.apk - but it is rather boring, it is the opening screen of Love and you cannot yet load a file, so this is without a game...It is just a development snapshot do not expact anything great.
This package does not contain all those license texts, I think we will have to add them in the final version (somewhere in the menus).

So are those changes going to be backported to the original code? Or will there be a code merge?
Btw, you are still at 0.7.2, right?

Yes, it is still 0.7.2. Dunno, if there will be a code merge - the most significant change is that we replaced SDL by Android things and OpenGL by GLES.

Depends on whether it's version 1 or 2 of GLES, or at least, that's what anjo always says.

It is ES1.1 at the moment, but we might port it to 2.0 when everything is working. Anyway, the ES required some changes which should give a performance boost in regular OpenGL.

Hey Moe,
is it possible to make a standalone builds using love-nativ-android? I mean adding a game to love runtime and distribution this package to Android store without building love-nativ-android myself?
cheers

The Android store requires that you sign your application with a trustworthy key. I have not yet tried if you can change a package after signing it without braking the signiture. That are things I have only done on development platforms without the market.

I have the same question except I am willing to build love-native-android myself, as I obviously want to build the actual app myself.

Of course, if you were to release love-native-android as a package that can simply be imported in an Eclipse Android project (like for example libgdx does it), that would be the best solution.

We added our Eclipse-project to github, the only thing you have to do is to fix the path in the NDK build step (and you need the SDK + Eclipse plugin). That is all for building, but we will need to add a detection for your love file (or you have to set its name manually). As soon as everythings works fine, this should be easy to add.

what/where are you referring to? Or do you mean to simply say that the issues are solved? If so, yay Can't wait for an apk to test my game.

Our main issue was the license chaos (one mega lib) we had. I changed the Android makefile to create a dynamic lib for each component. I think we need to add a screen to show the license text for all those libs, but that is doing only.

[T-Bone]

Sounds good to me I wonder about this license screen you mention, do all games have to show it? And where? Is it okay as long as it is in the game somewhere?
Also, the apk posted is currently around 6 MB after installing, compared to thee old one which was around 1.5 MB, that's quite a lot more. Is this increase in size permanent, or perhaps due to the test "game" included? Releasing a simple 2d game on the Market that's nearly 7 MB will look a little wierd, I think.

Thanks again for keeping this project alive, it's the best thing that has happened in Android game development ever