LÖVE

With alot of big games including Concerned Joe, luminosity and much more being released on alot of platforms and getting out to alot of people we are facing a problem with distribution: no official way of distributing for linux, .deb's would be really neat to have, are anyone working on it or willing to do it? because im sure we can all agree that .deb's would be really good to have.

jjmafiae wrote:we are facing a problem with distribution: no official way of distributing for linux, .deb's would be really neat to have, are anyone working on it or willing to do it? because im sure we can all agree that .deb's would be really good to have.

Sure debs would be cool, but what about rpms? What about Arch based systems? What about, etc. Furthermore, what about differences among various deb / rpm based systems, incompatibility exists even when both use the same basic package type.

Because of the nature of package management in Linux, it usually makes sense to have maintainers or users of the distribution package your software product. Furthermore, all a löve based game actually needs to work is a compatible version of löve. So (unless this is what you meant, in which case I apologize), it would be truly useful to make sure there are debs and rpms for all versions of löve.

Edit: Sorry, yes I agree there should be some effort to make an official deb and rpm of various version of löve.

that was what I meant.

There is no single way to make a binary package that works on all Linux distributions, that's why it hasn't been done.

.deb and .rpm packages can be made for all the biggest distros. Chances are if you are using a non-mainstream non Debian/Fedora based distro (say, Arch) you probably won't have any trouble figuring out how to use a .love.

Even compiling LOVE isn't all that time consuming.

The sort of unofficial way to install games on Linux is the humble shell script. Typically just serving up the .love file is enough, but I acknowledge there are a lot of users that don't know what love is or how to install the version that's right for their distro. I kind of recommend that you just assume Linux users are of higher technical capability and pointing them at Love2d.org is enough install instruction.

As for selling through steam or whatnot and getting it to install properly, you'll have to go the shell script path I mentioned and look into creating your own static binary builds of love for distribution. Remember to observe all license terms for Love and its dependencies (they're all mit and zlib, right?)

Inny wrote:As for selling through steam or whatnot and getting it to install properly, you'll have to go the shell script path I mentioned and look into creating your own static binary builds of love for distribution.

For a completely standalone game package on Linux you don't need to create static libraries of LOVE or its dependencies, but you do need to include the shared libraries with the executable like with Windows and OS X (in the latter case the libraries are inside the .app). I believe Steam has some systems in place which guarantees the existence of some libraries (like SDL2) on user's systems, so you don't need to include everything in that case.

For non-steam standalone (which is rarely or never needed), here are a couple helpful blog posts: http://jorgen.tjer.no/post/2014/05/26/s ... -on-linux/ http://jorgen.tjer.no/post/2014/05/28/s ... out-steam/

If your game got greenlit on Steam and you're preparing for a release, the Steamworks website has some helpful pages for distributing on Steam. This isn't something you should really worry about before that happens though.

Inny wrote:Remember to observe all license terms for Love and its dependencies (they're all mit and zlib, right?)

Some of LOVE's dependencies on Linux are zlib or MIT, some (like OpenAL-Soft, DevIL, and mpg123) are LGPL, which means you generally can't/don't want to link them statically.

The assumption that all Linux users are technically capable is unfortunate in my opinion. I'd prefer to make it super simple for at least Ubuntu users with a .deb, and then have a .love with a readme for the rest.

Creating a deb for love is no harder than doing it for anything else, just make it depend on love and probably add a launcher script, an icon and a shortcut and you're set.

really? is it that simple? im gonna research it now then.

One can also point out the the .exe's can be opened with Wine, which a lot of linux users have.