Moving from Brain Damage to love

[Mr. Strange]

Hey love(ly) people.

I'm a professional game designer, and I've recenly been using lua to prototype new concepts. I started using Brain Damage.exe, which was really a great tool, but is sadly sort of dead now. It also had slightly ghetto draw support, and no audio component.

So I'm looking at love, and I largely like what I see. But a few things aren't quite making sense, and I'd appreciate some help bringing myself up to speed.

1 - I see that my print messages go to stdout - but is there no way I could view them on-the-fly? I feel like maybe I'm missing something obvious here. I use trace messages all the time when starting work on a new routine, and I'm not sure I could function efficiently without them. It's entirely possible that there is an obvious way to display stdout.txt on the fly - but I don't know one.

2 - Is there a way to create multiple windows? Brain Damage allowed me to define individual onmouseup functions for each active window, which was pretty cool.

3 - I'm not sure how to quickly iterate on my files - right now I edit the .lua in TextPad, and I've defined an external command to trigger which runs love $FileDir - which is working pretty well. How do other people do this reasonably?

4 - I write game save output to text files, and I wonder how I could force those into a directory other than the one where love.exe is running?

I'm really excited to join the love community - I just need to clear a few more hurdles!

-- Mr. Strange

[Jake]

1 - I see that my print messages go to stdout - but is there no way I could view them on-the-fly? I feel like maybe I'm missing something obvious here. I use trace messages all the time when starting work on a new routine, and I'm not sure I could function efficiently without them. It's entirely possible that there is an obvious way to display stdout.txt on the fly - but I don't know one.

To be honest, my print messages never went to stdout. I think it's broken. Anyway, I use this code to produce a fake console output.

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local print_lines = {}
function print( ... )
	for k, v in pairs( {...} ) do
		table.insert( print_lines, tostring( v )  )
	end
end

function draw()
     --- at the end of your draw function
	local WIDTH = love.graphics.getWidth()
	-- draws the last 30 items of print_lines
	for i=1, math.min( 30, table.getn( print_lines ) ) do

		local n = math.max( table.getn( print_lines ) - 30, 0 ) + i

		love.graphics.setColor( 0,0,0,130 )
		love.graphics.draw( print_lines[ n ], (WIDTH-200) +1, i*15 +1 )
		
		love.graphics.setColor( 255,128,0,255 )
		love.graphics.draw( print_lines[ n ], WIDTH-200, i*15 )

	end
end

2 - Is there a way to create multiple windows? Brain Damage allowed me to define individual onmouseup functions for each active window, which was pretty cool.

I don't think this is possible but I'll let someone else confirm.

3 - I'm not sure how to quickly iterate on my files - right now I edit the .lua in TextPad, and I've defined an external command to trigger which runs love $FileDir - which is working pretty well. How do other people do this reasonably?

I'm not entirely sure what this means but maybe this will help.

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local list = love.filesystem.enumerate("subdir")
	for i=1, #list do
       		print("file: subdir/"..list[i])
	end
end

4 - I write game save output to text files, and I wonder how I could force those into a directory other than the one where love.exe is running?

Not sure.

[Merkoth]

1 - It's not broken, that's just the way SDL behaves. This thing coded by Zeddy might help you with the text output issue and also give you some cool features. Also, you can call

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love.system.suspend()

and see some of your output in the built-in error screen.

2 - Not that I know of. Actually, I don't think SDL supports this.

3 - Define reasonably? Most IDEs do just that, launching the tools with a few parameters. I don't see anything wrong with your method.

4 - I'm afraid you can only dig further into that directory. For example, you could place your save file into /GameFolder/Sys/GTFO/NORLYGTFO/ultra-secret.lol Weird file extensions will confuse most Windows users and hopefully, they won't cheat your save file.

Keep in mind that those files you create will not always end up into the game directory. Under Linux, for example, they'll be stored into the user home/.love/ directory (a hidden one, btw).

Finally, you might also try to use Lua's filesystem functions, I'm not sure if the lövers deativated them though.

Welcome Mr. Strange, I hope this helps and happy coding!

[rude]

Yeah ... what they said.

• On Windows, LÖVE is compiled with stdio redirect, which means that it writes the output to a file. For on-screen awesomeness, use Zeddy's console.
• There's only one window.
• Note that you must use love.filesystem for saves. The "io" and "os" library will be removed in the next version. If you're saving files next to the love.exe, then You're Doing It Wrong(tm).

Welcome, Mr. Strange!

[Mr. Strange]

Awesome. That's the sort of community support I've been missing!

I'll try that console thing - probably I'll hook it up to a key so I can toggle that information on and off - I'll probably also want to draw an alpha rectangle behind the output, to enhance readability.

--Mr. Strange

[rude]

It already has all that.

[Mr. Strange]

Yeah ... what they said.

• Note that you must use love.filesystem for saves. The "io" and "os" library will be removed in the next version. If you're saving files next to the love.exe, then You're Doing It Wrong(tm).

Welcome, Mr. Strange!

I look forward to adjusting my scripts, then. My first project was to "port" over a few thousand lines of script from Brain Damage -style to love-style. My io. calls were working, so I didn't bother adjusting them - I'll get on that!

--Mr. Strange

[Mr. Strange]

Ok, about the love.filesystem...

When reading a file, I typically read one line at a time, through the default behavior of io. I also like to force the result to a number, though that's not strictly necessary.

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file = io.open(filename, "r+")
	data = file:read("*number")

I haven't been able to reproduce this behavior with the love.filesystem structures, which is of the form:

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love.filesystem.read( file, count )

But maybe I can use a clever value for "count" which will give me this behavior?

--Mr. Strange

[rude]

Sorry, there's no love.filesystem.lines, nor is it possible to force a value into a number with "*number".

love.filesystem.lines will appear one day, but for now the best way of saving and loading stuff is actually writing Lua code:

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function save_highscore()
   local file = love.filesystem.newFile("highscore.lua", love.file_write)
   love.filesystem.open(file)
   love.filesystem.write(file, "highscore = { bob = 5, tom = 200, jane = 4000 }")
   love.filesystem.close(file)
end

Later, you can load the file with:

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love.filesystem.include("highscore.lua")
-- Table "highscore" is now available.