Love as Lua module

[vincentg]

Is there a way to use Love as a regular Lua module in a standalone Lua application?
Something like require('love')? I would see some useful features we could use outside a game like image batch processing where love window/game loop is not needed.

[zorg]

You can set love.window to false if you have a conf.lua defined, and you can redefine love.run yourself so that it doesn't loop at all; although if you write your main.lua to simply exit at the end, that can also work.

[Kimapr]

You can set love.window to false if you have a conf.lua defined, and you can redefine love.run yourself so that it doesn't loop at all; although if you write your main.lua to simply exit at the end, that can also work.

Yes, but this way you don't use LOVE as a module - your scripts still run under LOVE. Maybe it's possible to use LOVE as a library, but there is only one way to figure it out, try to do it by yourself. The problem is that it's hard.

[pgimeno]

This works for me if I copy liblove-11.2.so as love.so:

Code: Select all

require 'love'
require 'love.filesystem'
require 'love.window'
require 'love.graphics'
love.filesystem.init('.')
love.window.setMode(800, 600)
for i = 1, 100 do
  love.graphics.clear()
  love.graphics.rectangle("fill", 300,250,200,100)
  love.graphics.present()
end

For some reason,trying to use the font module resulted in a segfault at exit, though. I haven't dug into why. EDIT: It seems require('love.font') must be placed BEFORE require('love.window'), otherwise you get the segfault.

You can put this line at the top if you want more flexibility with the name of the LÖVE library:

Code: Select all

package.preload.love = package.loadlib('/path/to/liblove-11.2.so', 'luaopen_love')

And of course, you need to compile it dynamically, but that is the default (or grab a precompiled build).

[vincentg]

Thanks for the reply. It didn't work for me to use liblove-11.2.so. Maybe a incompatibility of versions, I will investiguate.

[pgimeno]

It needs Lua 5.1 or LuaJIT. Are you using LuaJIT to launch it?

[vincentg]

Yes I'm using LuaJIT 2.0.5 from my system. Actually it seems to work more or less with package.loadlib but not with the env variable LUA_PATH that's working with other modules.

[slime]

You'll probably need to use LUA_CPATH rather than LUA_PATH, since it's a C module.

[vincentg]

Thanks! I didn't know that one.