gamesrightmeow/playbit

Playbit is a framework for creating cross-platform Playdate games from a single Lua codebase.

playbit's Issues

Add support for language server plugins

All language server plugins mark preprocessor blocks and import lines as errors, since they're not actually part of native lua.

Might be able to configure this plugin to work correctly? Need to at least treat imports and preprocessors blocks as comments so that they aren't picked up as syntax errors.

Add support for non-ascii characters to fnt-to-bmfont conversion

The cap-to-bmfont converted currently doesn't support non-ascii chars. Detecting non-ascii chars and extracting them from kerning pairs was a bit tricky, so opted to skip it when I did the first implementation.

Playdate fonts with a tracking value set loaded in Love2d don't have the same length as when loaded on Playdate

Using the Rains-1x font from the SDK:

local font = playdate.graphics.font.new("fonts/font-rains-1x")
local width = font:getTextWidth("Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur")
print(width)

Playdate = 311
Love2D = 312

I believe this is an issue in Love2d where that it appends some extra padding from getWidth(str). Need to find a way to control this, or come up with some hacky workaround...

Add Mac support to Build script

Lua doesn't have a native way to detect the user's system. My workaround is rather hacky: run a command and confirm its output matches what's expected for that platform.

Windows and Linux (Ubuntu at least) are currently working, but I don't have access to a Mac to implement support.

playbit/tools/filesystem.lua

Lines 7 to 21 in 27fc7af

	local function detectPlatform()
	if platform > -1 then
	return
	end
	local command = io.popen("ver")
	local output = command:read("*a")
	if output and string.match(output, "Microsoft Windows") then
	platform = module.WINDOWS
	else
	-- TODO: actually do a test for Linux - does linux have a ver command?
	platform = module.LINUX
	end
	-- TODO: MAC?
	end

Implement CoreLibs/object

I've been taking a look at implementing CoreLibs/object, as my game makes pretty heavy use of it. As far as I can see, there's nothing that's really specific to playdate in the CoreLibs implementation, aside from a couple places that use +=. I've replaced those two lines so that it'd work in Love, and just straight up copied it into playbit, and that seems to work, though I'm not really sure if that's what we'd want/are entitled to do given that the file is (c) Playdate, and there's this particular clause of the SDK License.

You will not:
...
- Use the SDK to develop applications for other platforms or to develop another SDK, without express written permission from Panic.

Though I'm not sure how it could really be reimplemented in any meaningful way that isn't just... rewording the existing CoreLibs implementation.

Add support to build standalone Love2d executables

See .love-file and platform executables.

Icon needs to be set post build, with an external tool.

Implement image:drawFaded

This will require modifying the shader to support drawing with a dither algo.

Some resources:

• https://tannerhelland.com/2012/12/28/dithering-eleven-algorithms-source-code.html
• https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/
• https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg1363742#msg1363742

Write a custom love.run()

Playbit currently executes all game code within love.draw(). The downside to this is any called made outside of playdate.update() don't work in Love2d (but work on Playdate). Using a custom love.run() handler should fix this: https://love2d.org/wiki/love.run

Add support for synth sounds/audio/music

Playdate has a synth library. Would be nice to support this on the Love2d side since it would reduce game sizes when not using WAVs. Tricky part is getting synths to match the device.

Love2d doesn't support this out of the box, but this project might be a good starting point: https://github.com/superzazu/denver.lua

Calls to `setDrawMode()` should only affect the current context

Currently calls to playdate.graphics.setDrawMode() affect all future draw calls, regardless of the context their drawn to. This isn't how it works on Playdate; it seems to only apply to the current context.

Add alternative methods of specifying external tool paths

Currently playbit requires external tools (ffmeg, aseprite, etc) to be added to the user's path to work. This isn't ideal for everyone - some alternative options that should be explored:

• Try automatically locating the executable (see this comment thread for an example on Mac).
• Expose paths in build scripts

Find a way to read image size from font atlas

Since Lua doesn't have a native way to read dimensions of images, the fnt-to-bmfont tool make a hacky assumption based on a quirk of Caps:

playbit/tools/caps-to-bmfont.lua

Lines 158 to 172 in 27fc7af

	--[[
	Lua does not have any native way to read image size.
	However most fonts won't have less than 16 chars, and Caps
	won't put more than 16 chars in a row. So we can infer the
	image size based on this.
	--]]
	-- just in case, lets warn if I forget about this.
	if #input.glyphs < 16 then
	error("There are less than 16 characters in this font, so image size won't be correct: "..inputFntPath)
	end
	input.texWidth = input.tileWidth * 16
	input.textHeight = input.tileHeight * math.floor(#input.glyphs / 16)

Maybe use a command line tool? Image Magick's identify might do the trick. Though this will add another CLI dependency.