Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Questions about the LÖVE API, installing LÖVE and other support related questions go here.
Forum rules
Before you make a thread asking for help, read this.
User avatar
Robin
The Omniscient
Posts: 6506
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 4:29 pm
Location: The Netherlands
Contact:

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by Robin »

Could you upload the .love? It might provide some insight.
Help us help you: attach a .love.
voyager
Prole
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Aug 21, 2015 5:26 pm

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by voyager »

Robin wrote:Could you upload the .love? It might provide some insight.
Sure.
Attachments
game1.love
(199 Bytes) Downloaded 2425 times
User avatar
Robin
The Omniscient
Posts: 6506
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 4:29 pm
Location: The Netherlands
Contact:

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by Robin »

Ah, it seems like you made a .love from a 7-Zip archive instead of from a ZIP-file. The latter tends to work better, I couldn't even get LÖVE to run the .love on its own.
Help us help you: attach a .love.
Siwy
Prole
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2016 6:42 pm

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by Siwy »

Hello.
Can someone tell me what am I doing wrong? I feel some dumb right now.
I have put all my files in a folder called "test" and i packed it to .zip using winrar. I changed the name to test.love and when i try to run it i get
bla bla bla boot.lua 432: No code to run
Your game might be packed incorrectly so on so on..

Please tell me what have I done wrong?
User avatar
Robin
The Omniscient
Posts: 6506
Joined: Fri Feb 20, 2009 4:29 pm
Location: The Netherlands
Contact:

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by Robin »

As the error message says, you probably zipped the folder "test" instead of its contents. So in the .zip, there is no main.lua at the top level, just a folder called "test".
Help us help you: attach a .love.
Siwy
Prole
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Feb 28, 2016 6:42 pm

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by Siwy »

Robin wrote:As the error message says, you probably zipped the folder "test" instead of its contents. So in the .zip, there is no main.lua at the top level, just a folder called "test".
Yeah you're right.. what a flop. Now I've encountered another problem, i packed the game to .love did this whole copy /b thing in cmd and tried to run it on a different pc but i got "The program can't start because love.dll is missing" does this mean i have to, have love framework installed on each PC i want to run the game on or did I do something wrong? I also try making the test.love file with all the .dlls from the love folder but it didn't bring any results.
User avatar
slime
Solid Snayke
Posts: 3129
Joined: Mon Aug 23, 2010 6:45 am
Location: Nova Scotia, Canada
Contact:

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by slime »

You have to have love.dll, openal32.dll, SDL2.dll, lua51.dll, mpg123.dll, msvcp120.dll, and msvcr120.dll in the same folder as your fused exe.
bobbyjones
Party member
Posts: 730
Joined: Sat Apr 26, 2014 7:46 pm

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by bobbyjones »

You also have to make the said fused exe
User avatar
Jwatt
Prole
Posts: 41
Joined: Sat Jul 23, 2016 1:38 pm
Contact:

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by Jwatt »

What are the benefits of renaming the source .zip as .love? Is that a legacy thing, or does it affect something that I haven't encountered? My packaged executables seem to work the same regardless of the file extension.
curious handcrafted games
User avatar
Nixola
Inner party member
Posts: 1949
Joined: Tue Dec 06, 2011 7:11 pm
Location: Italy

Re: Distributing your games (making a .love file)

Post by Nixola »

LÖVE can tell the system it can open .love files, so even though it's literally just a zip file it adds a layer of convenience when you want to run it. For example, if you install LÖVE on Windows you can just double-click a .love file, but you'd have to drag a .zip file over LÖVE's executable/link in order to run it.
lf = love.filesystem
ls = love.sound
la = love.audio
lp = love.physics
lt = love.thread
li = love.image
lg = love.graphics
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Ahrefs [Bot] and 19 guests