Is it possible to port a LOVE game into a Visual Studio app?

[Bannana97]

I actually thought this would be very nice. You could make studios or something out of Visual Studio: VB.NET, C++, C#, whatever.
Is it at all possible to embed/port/place a LOVE game into these types of applications? Is it doable already?

[Kyle]

What are you talking about? All you need is a text editor. You can embed a text editor into a C++ program if you want, but it'd be a massive waste of your time when there are applications like Sublime Text.

[Bannana97]

Sorry. I suck at explaining things.

Anyhow, I am making a game where you build a world essentially. I want to make a studio mode so that users are able to go "offline" and place objects with a nice GUI using Windows Forms in Visual Studio. So they insert new parts, edit the game GUI, all within my Windows Form app.

It's not possible to put a LOVE game into a form app, huh?

[Kyle]

It's certainly possible, but you're going to have to do a lot more work than just including LOVE. That's a lot of game specific stuff.

[Bannana97]

Suggestions on a place to start? Or at least a clue on how to go about it. :/

[Kyle]

Suggestions on a place to start? Or at least a clue on how to go about it. :/

I'd suggest writing an entity system first. An entity would just be a bin of components that do things. Look at how Unity does it. Then your studio could just generate Lua that sets up an entity.

For example, you'd have a Transform component that defines the entity's position, rotation, scale, and probably offset. You'd also have an Image component to give it a visual representation. If you wanted physics, you might add a RigidBody component for simulation and a Shape component for collision.

For more complex entities, like a tilemap, you'd write custom components just for those.

If you do pull this off, let me know because I'd be interested.