LÖVE development tools
slime73 opened this issue · 8 comments
Original report by Sasha Szpakowski (Bitbucket: slime73, GitHub: slime73).
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.
Original comment by Sasha Szpakowski (Bitbucket: slime73, GitHub: slime73).
Lua's debug library already lets you do that (e.g. http://unknownworlds.com/decoda/ or http://studio.zerobrane.com )
Original comment by Pablo Mayobre (Bitbucket: PabloMayobre, GitHub: PabloMayobre).
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.
Original comment by hahawoo (Bitbucket: hahawoo, GitHub: hahawoo).
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).
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.