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Thanks for sharing this journey! I've been considering Love2D for a while so it's important to read about the challenges others run into. You should definitely

Thanks for sharing this journey! I've been considering Love2D for a while so it's important to read about the challenges others run into. You should definitely not have to package Mesa to ship a game! I wonder why it hooks so far deeply.. Coming from PICO-8 myself, I'm wondering if I should just skip the frameworks to babystep and just jump into C+SDL, or pygame or something. I like the different ways that games can be made -- like your procedural graphics not needing a graphics library.

rollcat 3y ago
The "can I link Mesa statically" journey was futile, I had much less understanding how things worked back then (not that I'm any kind of an expert now, but you shouldn't be one to ship a f.in game). See, a pretty big chunk of the graphics driver stack on Linux sits in the .so's provided by Mesa: the i915_dri.so, r600_dri.so, nouveau_dri.so, libvulkan_intel.so, libvulkan_radeon.so, etc are ALL exactly what it says on the package. It's not just 50+MB of x86-64 code, it's also your peace of mind that whenever AMD/Intel/NVidia/Apple/RPi/etc drop a new GPU model, or whenever the kernel changes things on their end, you don't need to relink and re-release. I'm torn between "all of this stuff belongs in the kernel goddammit" and "these guys probably know better". OpenBSD and macOS actually force all syscalls to go through a dynamically linked libc, so perhaps it's the latter. Libraries/frameworks/engines such as PICO-8, Love2d, SDL, Allegro, Pygame, Godot, etc exist precisely to abstract away these details; you're not meant to care for libGL.so.1, you're meant to care for fixing your physics engine's timestep and using cubic splines to interpolate animation. Love2d was not a mature choice in 2016, so don't take my horror story or my hubris as any indication of what it looks like today; do your own research and pick the tool for the job ;) TBH I would love to go back to making games, but recently got too absorbed by StarCraft 2 and shitposting.
- zlg_codes 3y ago
  Part of my interest is also getting better at Lua, and it seems to excel in embedded contexts like making small 2D games. So maybe Love2D will still be good for that, and maybe the statically linking story is better now. My eventual goal is similar to yours -- I want to ship a game with a single binary per platform that players don't have to get confused about. Completing a game at all would be good enough, but I want to do it right!

rollcat 3y ago

The "can I link Mesa statically" journey was futile, I had much less understanding how things worked back then (not that I'm any kind of an expert now, but you shouldn't be one to ship a f.in game). See, a pretty big chunk of the graphics driver stack on Linux sits in the .so's provided by Mesa: the i915_dri.so, r600_dri.so, nouveau_dri.so, libvulkan_intel.so, libvulkan_radeon.so, etc are ALL exactly what it says on the package. It's not just 50+MB of x86-64 code, it's also your peace of mind that whenever AMD/Intel/NVidia/Apple/RPi/etc drop a new GPU model, or whenever the kernel changes things on their end, you don't need to relink and re-release. I'm torn between "all of this stuff belongs in the kernel goddammit" and "these guys probably know better". OpenBSD and macOS actually force all syscalls to go through a dynamically linked libc, so perhaps it's the latter. Libraries/frameworks/engines such as PICO-8, Love2d, SDL, Allegro, Pygame, Godot, etc exist precisely to abstract away these details; you're not meant to care for libGL.so.1, you're meant to care for fixing your physics engine's timestep and using cubic splines to interpolate animation. Love2d was not a mature choice in 2016, so don't take my horror story or my hubris as any indication of what it looks like today; do your own research and pick the tool for the job ;) TBH I would love to go back to making games, but recently got too absorbed by StarCraft 2 and shitposting.

zlg_codes 3y ago
Part of my interest is also getting better at Lua, and it seems to excel in embedded contexts like making small 2D games. So maybe Love2D will still be good for that, and maybe the statically linking story is better now. My eventual goal is similar to yours -- I want to ship a game with a single binary per platform that players don't have to get confused about. Completing a game at all would be good enough, but I want to do it right!