love-appimages

I made this, because there are no official AppImages for versions before löve 11 and because I think even those are somewhat complicated (the love script in the root is unnecessary, because AppRun already does it), they could make packaging games with them a tiny bit easier and parameters are not handled correctly (e.g. ./love.AppImage --fused mygame.love will not work).

I also wanted to automate the process (so everyone could do it) and implicitely document it that way, which is done through the build.py script, which you can point to a löve repository after a successful build (see the bottom of this README on notes on building older versions). The build_all.sh script is an illustration of all the necessary steps that surround build.py.

The Releases page provides AppImages that I built using that script.

Regarding the shared libraries I included in the AppImages I started with what the official löve AppImages include and added what was missing for the earlier versions until it ran on a few test systems (including Arch, Debian Stretch, Ubuntu 18). Sadly AppImages cannot include glibc or libstdc++ and still rely on the ones installed on your system. To build them I used a virtual machine on DigitalOcean (yes, this is advertisement) running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which includes glibc version 2.23, so if your system is running any version later than that, the AppImages should work.

Creating an AppImage of Your Game from a löve AppImage

You can use this if you want to: makelove (coming in the next few days if not already there)

Please note that you will only be able to follow these steps if you are using Linux. This will also not work on WSL, because of a lack of FUSE support and therefore a lack of support for AppImages altogether.

With my AppImages your game will run in fused mode, if it's run from inside an AppImage. If you do not want this, edit usr/bin/wrapper-love.

Unless your game relies on a bug, you can pick the latest major release your game was made for (e.g. if your game was made for version 0.10.1, pick 0.10.2). Then be lucky and find the AppImage for that version on the Releases page and download it.

Extract the AppImage:

chmod +x love_11_3.AppImage
./love_11_3.AppImage --appimage-extract

This will extract the AppImage into the squashfs-root subdirectory of your current working directory. That directory is called the AppDir.

Put your game's .love file into the usr/bin subdirectory.

You must not delete license.txt, as stated by the Game Distribution löve wiki page.

If you have a custom icon, delete love.svg and .DirIcon and place your icon in that directory. Supported file formats are .png and .svg.

The .desktop File

Then just adjust and rename the love.desktop file to your liking (but do not end up with multiple .desktop files!):

• You should probably change Name, Comment.
• Remove MimeType (as your löve application will probably not open files passed to it) and NoDisplay (because you want it to show up in launchers).
• You may modify the parameters in Exec (%f to forward only a single parameter, or remove the parameter entirely if you don't want or need them), but you must call wrapper-love there.
• You probably want to adjust Categories to Categories=Game; (note the mandatory trailing semicolon!).
• If you have a custom icon, specify it's name (without the file extension!), e.g. Icon=gameicon.

Use this template if you like:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Pain of Blood Destruction - Ultimate Savage Edition
Comment=Rescue the world with a piece of gum!
Exec=wrapper-love %F
Type=Application
Categories=Game;
Terminal=false
Icon=flowerpot

Handling Shared Libraries

If your game wants to shared libraries via FFI, you need to put them to any path added to LD_LIBRARY_PATH (see here: AppRun.c, e.g. usr/lib)

If your game wants to load Lua modules from shared libraries, you need to add them anywhere into your AppDir (I recommend usr/lib again) and add that path to package.cpath:

local APPDIR = os.getenv("APPDIR")
if APPDIR then
    package.cpath = package.cpath .. ";" .. APPDIR .. "/usr/lib/?.so"
end

The APPDIR environment variable is set by the AppRun executable.

Packaging

To turn your AppDir into an AppImage again, download the appimagetool and simply invoke it like this to produce MySuperGame.AppImage:

appimagetool MyAppDir MySuperGame.AppImage

Notes on Building Older Versions

Some older versions might not build right away and here I collected some notes on how to make it work (thanks of course to slime for all the help). If you find remarks to add here or try out versions I have not tried building (see releases and tested_versions in build.py), feel free to create a pull request or create an issue!

Building 0.10.2

Your distro might use luajit 2.1 for it's luajit dev packages, while löve was made for luajit 2.0. Some defines might have been removed, which will result in your compilation to fail after a regular checkout of the 0.10.2 tag.

It works for me if I do this:

cd src/libraries/luasocket/libluasocket
sed -i 's/luaL_reg/luaL_Reg/g' *

Alternatively, just download the patch and apply it:

git apply fix_0_10_2.patch

Building 0.9.2

See here: https://bitbucket.org/rude/love/issues/1537/some-problems-when-compile-love-092

Summary: What I am recommending here is not safe. If you know how to do it better or actually observe these crashes, contact me.

To apply those changes, download the patch and apply it:

git apply fix_0_9_2.patch