LÖVE development tools

[slime73]

Original report by Sasha Szpakowski (Bitbucket: slime73, GitHub: slime73).

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LÖVE currently works nicely as a development and runtime library/framework without any split between the two, but there are some things that I feel are missing from the development side which wouldn't make sense to include in end-user runtime distributions, especially when Android and iOS are taken into account.

A more robust no-game screen (maybe including a list of recently used .love files which you can click), Shader validation, texture compression (especially when you add mobile since you'd want DXT-compressed images on desktop, PVR on iOS and ETC on Android), and some other asset-related things are a few ideas I've had which fit that scope.

The development stuff might be an extra dll and possibly a love-dev executable, although that's just my first thought on it.

[slime73]

Original comment by Landon “Karai” Manning (Bitbucket: karai17, GitHub: karai17).

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Would it be possible to add in direct debug support, such as listing data within variables, the ability to walk through lines, etc?

[slime73]

Original comment by Sasha Szpakowski (Bitbucket: slime73, GitHub: slime73).

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Lua's debug library already lets you do that (e.g. http://unknownworlds.com/decoda/ or http://studio.zerobrane.com )

[slime73]

Original comment by Landon “Karai” Manning (Bitbucket: karai17, GitHub: karai17).

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Ugh, the last thing I want to do is install yet another IDE. Do you know of any Lua debug plugins for sublime?

[slime73]

Original comment by Carlo Cabanilla (Bitbucket: clofresh, GitHub: clofresh).

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Maybe a packaging tool as well, since everyone tries to write their own brittle one and eventually gets bored of maintaining it?

[slime73]

Original comment by Pablo Mayobre (Bitbucket: PabloMayobre, GitHub: PabloMayobre).

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love-release is amazing. I hope that MisterDA wont give up on it. We should give more support to it and try to port it to windows at some point. But yeah I understand what you mean.

[slime73]

Original comment by Sasha Szpakowski (Bitbucket: slime73, GitHub: slime73).

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Shader validation is now in love 0.11's main API as love.graphics.validateShader.

[slime73]

Original comment by hahawoo (Bitbucket: hahawoo, GitHub: hahawoo).

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For what it's worth, I don't think I would use the no-game screen for launching .love files on a non-mobile computer, I think I would always use the operating system's file manager instead.

I also like how LOVE is "portable", i.e. it doesn't leave behind files (unless the .love file creates them).

[slime73]

Maybe a packaging tool as well, since everyone tries to write their own brittle one and eventually gets bored of maintaining it?

This was brought up again recently and I think it's a good idea (to the extent that it's technically feasible on each platform at least - for example iOS might be off the table).

Packaging has quirks and is tricky to get right for each platform, and isn't really 'self-contained' the way most of the rest of love is. It'd be good to make it as simple for users to do as possible.