Our favorite AppleXsider today caught a new addition to the now famous section 3.3.2 of the Apple Developer agreement. According to the new verbiage, any interpreter can be used so long as the company that makes it isn't also a term for mud-built houses:
Heh. Seriously, this is to allow game interpreters like Lua to be used in iOS gaming, amongst other things.
Basically, Apple updated their agreement to clarify that game engine plug-ins for the SDK that allow you to program your games in an interpreted language are now allowed. Rather than before where they were disallowed only to allow natively compiled Cocoa Touch applications. The part that caught my eye was the specific mention of Lua.
Yeah, I know the whole thing has been run into the ground, Löve would never work unless all the dependencies were ported too, but I figured I'd mention it. Just dreaming of a day when I can indeed build a game for the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad in a language that isn't super hard to figure out.
Yeah, I caught this on Apple Outsider's blog when he first posted it. I'm a fan of the change, certainly, since I think barring scripting languages from video games is one of the most counterproductive moves you can make if you're trying to run an app store.
That said, iLÖVE is almost certainly not happening in the near future. There are a lot of things that need to fall into place - the biggest issue is still writing an OpenGL/ES backend for love.graphics, though the uLove project might well be a help on that front. The official release of SDL 1.3 is also important, as is porting/replacing all the various libs LÖVE uses, and writing a totally new input backend in order to handle touch, accelerometer, etc. There's a lot of effort that would have to go into an iDevice port - effort that would be better spent improving the engine itself.
Well this is my view on Apple's acceptance program (or whatever it is called):
Humble developer: Pleaaase please apple can I have Lua on my game?
Apple: You amuse me little programmer. Ok. But you can't use any shade of green in your game. Apples can be green, and that would be a Copiright Infringement.
Humble developer: Thanks Apple! I'll do what I can.
(1 year later)
Humble developer: I had to sell my house, but I've finished the game! And it uses no green! And it looks fantastic! I'm going to be rich.
Apple: Yeah, about that ... now we've decided you don't have permission for publishing your game.
Humble developer: What? Why?
Apple: You include french toasts in your game. Toasts are not pretty enough. Also you used that lua thing too much.
Humble developer: But I only used it on the menu screen!
Apple: Wouldn't you call that a major feature of the game? Banned. Bwahahahaha.
Yeah, the only things I HATE about the iPhone is the stupidly designed licensing and the lack of multiprocessing. Did you know that if somebody gets a refund on your game that YOU have to COVER APPLES LOSES!!!???
