Transplant love to iphone/ipad/android by learing Corona?

[bobdos]

i found a 2d game engine named "Corona", and it use lua for programming, then it convert to native language for iphone/ipad/android

so , could we do the same thing like what corona have done?

then we can transplant love games to iphone/ipad/android

http://anscamobile.com/corona/

[bartbes]

The biggest 'problem' yet is that we don't use mobile libraries, like OpenGL ES (Corona does), if we were to add these libraries it wouldn't be that hard to get games running on mobile platforms.
Now I understand you want us to add those libraries as soon as possible, we won't, for something that hasn't reached 1.0 we should focus on getting it stable and feature-complete, not on porting. (though we already have good abstraction)

[kikito]

Also, regarding the iphone, their license explicitly prohibits any kind of Lua-based applications. I mean, you can develop then, but they will never get approved on the AppStore.

[Jasoco]

Especially ever since the 4.0 reveal. It's a shame too because how cool would it be to create Löve-based multi-touch games for the iPad? Man, I would have so much fun. I'd settle for an iPhone version of Löve that could only work on Jailbroken iDevices. It would give me a reason to actually keep my iPod touch jailbroken. But of course it all comes down to all the libraries Löve depends on not being available on the iPhone OS. Maybe if they ever all become available we can convince the Mac Löve person to whip something up? Maybe not.

[bmelts]

Mac LÖVE person here. There's a few things that would need to happen for even a hypothetical jailbreakable LÖVE for iPhone to happen.

1) I'd need an iDevice. I don't own one, I'd kind of have to have one for development purposes.
2) Either SDL 1.3 needs to be stable (no idea when that's gonna happen, probably around when Duke Nukem Forever gets released) or rewrite a bunch of stuff to not use SDL. The latter option is a lot of time and effort.
3) Someone needs to write an OpenGL/ES version of love.graphics. That is also a lot of time and effort right there. (This is useful for more than just iPhone, though.)

If all that gets accomplished, then yeah, hypothetical development on LÖVE for iPhone could start, involving things like:

4) Writing backends for love.image and love.sound and friends that use the iDevices' native libraries for that sort of thing. (I have a version of love.image that uses the Mac's Image I/O framework, actually...)
5) Adding a love.input module that handles touch and accelerometer stuff, preferably via SDL. This renders love.mouse and love.joystick useless.
6) Camera support? Core Location integration? Other stuff?

It'd also be a fair amount of work to make extant .love files run without issue on the iPhone - things like love.mouse.getX() don't really work when there is no mouse.

But yeah. Assuming conditions 1-3 happen, an iPhone version of LÖVE is totally possible.

[Robin]

Isn't it somehow possible to map the touch to the mouse? (As in: using love.mouse on the iPhone will actually be accessing the touch system.) Probably not, but might be worth trying.

[bmelts]

It's doable - the finger is an inherently different input device from the mouse, but things like getPosition() could be replaced with the position of the last tap, or... something. And I guess different buttons could be represented by different numbers of fingers, thanks to multitouch - "l" is 1 finger, "r" is 2, etc.

I've got no clue about what one would do about joysticks, though.

[Robin]

accelerometer?

[kikito]

There's the gps receptor too. One could control the game by running like mad from one place to the other.

[Robin]

That would make a great maze game.