0.6.0 Update

[Sslaxx]

No bugs found on my pc so far, although older game versions do not run, I thought love was backwards compatible?

Elaborate on "do not run"?

[Jammang]

ok so they run, but because the older version says 'draw()' and not 'love.draw()' there is just a black screen in the game window.

[bartbes]

There are other incompatible things, backwards compatibility is not our focus until release 1.0 (and yes, that is some time away)

For LÖVE 0.7.0, sure,

Ah, you're thinking you'll be dead by then, don't you?
Anyway, rude plans on making revisions again (you know major.minor.revision), so we're going to see a 0.6.1 come by first. (unless rude changes his plans)

[Jasoco]

I agree, the MacBook motion sensing is awesome and provides some serious gameplay potential - even if a laptop is a bit more awkward to manipulate in a 3d space than its younger cousin, the iPhone. As cool as motion sensing is, though, it's a pretty limited feature - only people with certain kinds of Macs would be able to take advantage of it, since I don't know of any non-MacBooks that have that feature exposed. So, I'm not sure that feature is a great fit for LÖVE at this point (are there any game frameworks out there that support it? I haven't heard of any). On the other hand, if LÖVE ever gets ported to the iPhone, then I could see about implementing it

If you want to get technical, Cocoa has full access to it if you know the calls. Java can also access it. Look up "SmackBook". Ever since seeing that, I've wished someone would make a "gesture system" for OS X laptops that could detect tapping the edges of the screen like that to perform commands. But alas, no one has made one yet.

http://blog.medallia.com/2006/05/smacbook_pro.html

Motion sensing is getting popular. Slowly. (Not to mention the Wii and PS3 of course.) But is still a niche. But a damn cool niche at that.

[Simtex]

Simtex: that's certainly not supposed to happen. 64-bit builds will come eventually, though it will require compiling all libraries as 64-bit as well. That will take tons of time, so not going to do that for 0.6.0. Does the crash happen with just the no-game screen too?

Yeah it happens with the no-game screen too. I was able to track down some info on the crash. Apparently it happens due to LOVE trying to open a file for writing in the \Program Files\Love directory, which Windows no longer lets you do unless the program is "run as Administrator". This is part of the UAC (user access control) security scheme Microsoft implemented with Vista and is continuing with Windows 7 (I don't know if you have a Windows PC and are aware of this). If I run LOVE as an Administrator, the problem goes away. This is a bit of a hassle though since if you run LOVE often to test a program with, every time you run it with administrator access, Windows will grey out the screen, and pop up a box asking if you really want to give LOVE administrator access.

Microsoft wants developers to only write to the Program Files\(Program Name) directory when installing. After that, they want programs to only write to the \Users\(User Name)\ directories. Usually that means:
"\Users\(User Name)\AppData\Roaming\(Application Name)\"

The rules about this, and how they manage backwards compatibility with Windows XP programs (they use something called virtual folders) can get complex.

Some applicable links in case you have a lot of free time on your hands (haha!):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163486.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/maga ... 6.uac.aspx
White Paper on the various folders:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... 0Guide.doc

[Simtex]

Just to confirm then, if we want to create our own color constants, we'll need to do something like this:

Code: Select all

storedColors.red = {255, 0, 0}
love.graphics.setColor(unpack(storedColors.red))

Is that correct?

Edit: Also, are there plans to standardize font drawing with image drawing? Drawing an image at an x,y coordinate orients the upper left hand corner of the image to the coordinate, while text is oriented to the lower left hand corner of the text.

Sorry about all the questions, I just started to convert over my LOVE project, and it's going well for the most part.

[zer0wolf]

I've been teaching myself Lua lately and have been keeping an eye on Love for quite some time. Here in a few days I'm planning on diving into Love, so my question is Love 0.5 or 0.6? With 0.6 coming up soon, I'm wondering if I should start working with the snapshot builds of it, or stick with 0.5 and wait for the actual 0.6 release? I would hate to start learning with 0.5 and then shortly into it try to switch to 0.6, but then again I'm not sure about how close the 0.6 snapshots are to a final release?

[Robin]

my question is Love 0.5 or 0.6?

0.6.0 IMHO. It's pretty stable, and release is quite close (I have no idea how close, though... only rude knows that--that is, if he does).

[Jasoco]

If you're just starting now, go with 0.6.0 since if you start with 0.5.0 you'll have to recode a lot of stuff later. But make sure you go by the new guidelines and not the old documentation since it will lead you wrong.

[rude]

@Simtex: thanks for that information. I'm currently running Windows 7 32-bit. Weird that I don't have the same problem. LÖVE does indeed redirect stdout/err to a file in the Windows build. I guess this should be changed to %APPDATA%/LOVE/stdout|err.txt.

As for the 0.6.0 snapshots, they are "pretty stable" [1], though still subject to some changes. For instance, "we" just recently decided to change all the constants into strings.

Code: Select all

-- Old
love.keyboard.isDown(love.key_a)
love.graphics.setBlendMode(love.blend_additive)
-- New
love.keyboard.isDown('a')
love.graphics.setBlendMode('additive')

I'm currently (that is, now and then) working on a simple markup language which we (devs) will use to rewrite the documentation. When the parser is complete, it must be hooked into the existing XHTML generator (also new since 0.5.0). The documentation source will eventually be editable by users, but that will not happen until after release---unless we want to postpone the release even further.

Meanwhile, use the 0.6.0 snapshots if you can (though it's not that easy without docs ). The more general testing the better.

[1] Which could mean anything.