LÖVE

Is it possible to port LÖVE games onto and Ipad. I do believe it has enough RAM......

Possible is everything ;-).

nLÖVE runs on a 32mb device (dingoo a320). So yeah it's possible. Sometimes ago there was an iphone port. I think it's outdated and not fully functional.

here it is
https://bitbucket.org/bmelts/love-iphone

SiENcE wrote:Possible is everything ;-).

nLÖVE runs on a 32mb device (dingoo a320). So yeah it's possible. Sometimes ago there was an iphone port. I think it's outdated and not fully functional.

here it is
https://bitbucket.org/bmelts/love-iphone

Is there a newer port?

I don't think so. Just follow the forks :-)

SiENcE wrote:I don't think so. Just follow the forks :-)

How do you run it on the ipod?

LÖVE for iOS is definately a popular idea, every few weeks there seems 2 be a new post asking for/about it...

Problem is it's not really that simple. An iOS version would first require iOS versions of every library Löve uses.

Next the decision would have to be made whether to make it Jailbreak only or somehow get it on the App Store by making it be a front-end for your .love games. The latter option would allow you to use iOS' ability to have apps have a storage area in their sandbox that you could copy .love files to.

If it were me I'd also implement DropBox support to allow people to just work on their projects from their DropBox and reload it on the iOS device which would simply redownload the changed files and run the program again.

Another problem is getting back to the game selection menu. iOS doesn't have a hardware Back button like Android (Which I'm THANKFUL for BTW.) so you'd need either a toolbar on the screen at all times using up valuable pixels that would contain the back button, or a gesture. Another option would be having the game use the Quit command to exit back, but not every project would have this command right off the bat. Especially someone just starting a project and testing it for the first time. Without a Back button of some sort, there'd be a lot of Force Quitting of löve to get it to reload fresh back into the menu.

I guess the first step is making sure libraries exist. Then make it Jailbreak only at the start. But the real problem is who would want to take on the project. We already have people working on Android Löve which is coming along, but it's all a big process and regular computer Löve still isn't finished yet, but maybe one day. Maybe. One. Day.

I mean, I love my iPad and would love to Löve on it, but I'd sooner just learn the basics of HTML5 and make my game for all tablets and phones and computers in one project without requiring an app. Take a look at BrowserQuest and see what I mean. It's impressive that THIS is what we can do with a simple WEB BROWSER on a tiny PHONE these days.

LÖVE for iOS is definately a popular idea,bUt i think it is impossible.

sweetyang2012 wrote:LÖVE for iOS is definately a popular idea,bUt i think it is impossible.

Well, it's not THAT hard

First, It doesn't have to have to be the Love engine that is ported to other platforms, there is already a cocos2d-x engine with Lua bindings working for iOS (and Android, Playbook and other esoteric mobile devices Bada, QNX, etc)

Second, you need an intermediate Lua layer, think about a game framework on Lua that abstracts the direct access to these engines, so we hide all the love.something and CCObjects::someCall code behind this facade.

Third, profit! You deploy for desktops with Love and for mobiles with cocos2d-x. I think the engines complement quite well: cocos2d-x is still using the OGLES driver on windows and there is no native Mac version. Love 2D has still alpha support for android but for iOS is going to take some time (if ever)

There are going to be hiccups of course, Love and cocos2d-x are two different beasts. There is no a one vs one mapping of features (ie: shaders, media support, box2d is not linked with Lua in cocos2d-x, and the whole cocos2d-x Lua binding is usable but I wouldn't call it rock solid stable and feature complete (at difference of the C++ or Objective-C engines that have been used in many commercial games). Also it's the inherent difference of mobile platforms vs desktop platforms, you can not expect some magic to happen to allow you to have the same desktop game running without some compromises on limited mobile devices unless the game is pretty simple. But you could expect to reuse your game logic and select different game assets and capabilities accordingly to your target reducing the time of porting.

I think an alpha version of this "glue" framework can be made relatively quick for having sprites, sounds and events to start having fun

I ported my tetris clone in Love to coco2d-x this weekend, the code of my game "object" is the same in both engines because my game is very simple and I was using a platform "object" from the beginning to interact with the Love engine, so for cocos2d-x I only translated that object.

I did it using my own scripting language, (no Lua, sorry) but I'm sure someone interested can do the same. If you are interested here is my cocos2d-x fork:
https://github.com/ex/cocos2d-x

As long as the OS can run c++/c it should be fine.