bare basic newbie question...

[tyr]

How do you actually make something with löve?

I've tried following the tutorial, I understand it fine. But even when I copy and paste the exact text from the tutorial into my text editor and save it as .love it just won't execute. Dragging and dropping into the main löve window does nothing either.
What am I missing here?
Must Lua be installed on your computer (somehow, I'm new to this language) or something?
All three demos run on my computer just fine.

[osgeld]

drag n drop onto the love icon if your in windows

[Robin]

How do you actually make something with löve?

I hope I can explain it to you.

I've tried following the tutorial, I understand it fine. But even when I copy and paste the exact text from the tutorial into my text editor and save it as .love it just won't execute. Dragging and dropping into the main löve window does nothing either.
What am I missing here?

The .love file is not a your program, it is a .zip file (and, useful for development: it can also be a directory).
The game.love file or game/ directory has the following structure:

Code: Select all

game.love/
    main.lua -- this is main game file
    game.conf -- optional, game settings
    <other files, such as Lua files, image resources, license text, etc>

Must Lua be installed on your computer (somehow, I'm new to this language) or something?

No. Lua is already embedded in the LÖVE application.

[tyr]

drag n drop onto the love icon if your in windows

That gives me a brief loading hourglass then nought. Not a error message or anything.

The .love file is not a your program, it is a .zip file (and, useful for development: it can also be a directory).
The game.love file or game/ directory has the following structure:

Aha, this works just fine.
No hamster.png found but making a little image of a circle (the background stays there though when I use it...darn) and calling it such makes it work.
Very, very strange system. It looks like a utterly normal folder yet it works like this....
Thanks.


edit-
One weird thing I've noticed.
When I have the file on my desktop it drags and drops and executes just fine. When I try and move it into a love folder though then dragging and dropping onto my icon doesn't work. What is going on here?

[Robin]

One weird thing I've noticed.
When I have the file on my desktop it drags and drops and executes just fine. When I try and move it into a love folder though then dragging and dropping onto my icon doesn't work. What is going on here?

Are you drag&dropping the game folder, not the main.lua?

I usually run my games by one of two ways:

1. I've added a menu item so in Explorer/Thunar, I have an option "Love this" that will run the selected folder.
2. I run "love ." in the terminal.

[Raider]

Tyr,
You have to zip the folder, then rename the .zip extension to .love.

As was said earlier, a .love file is just a renamed .zip, which is just a zipped folder.
Hence, dropping a folder, dropping a zip file, and dropping a .love file are all much the same thing, except Love has to extract .zip files before it can use the resources in them.

[TechnoCat]

LOVE Documentation 0.5.0 - Getting started
This should help, it got me on track when I first started.