Löve, You failed me
Hi,
I found out, that my game is not working on some computers. Grr.
After some tests I finally managed to reproduce it on my own computer and found out, that Löve is shipping without Microsoft.VC80.CRT .
If you look at the love.exe file, you’ll find, that the manifest describing dependencies explicitly lists this file.
So it’s nice from the Löve developers to ship msvcp80.dll and msvcr80.dll, but without the Microsoft.VC80.CRT is kind of pointless, because they won’t be find on computers that don’t have Visual Studio Redistribution Package installed.
I already filed a bug in the Löve bug tracker and added the file to my game. So if you couldn’t start it, you can now try again.
I assume it applies to all games that used Löve – so this is a nice standalone solution, that doesn’t force users to install VS redistributables.
I duno about you, but I have a Microsoft.VC80.CRT.manifest file that shipped with Love.. maybe you just forgot to copy it to go with your standalone because it isn’t a dll?
Actually, part of the problem with your game might just have been that you’re using a batch file to run a program that may or may not still be zipped. (I had to extract your game and all related files or else it would give me an error, I was expecting to be able to just run it from within the zipped folder)
There is a better way to dsitribute love games:
Put main.lua and all other game files (images, scripts, etc)
in a zip file, and rename it from myGame.zip to myGame.love
then use command prompt to binary join the myGame.love file with the love.exe file. (http://www.love2d.org/docs/GameDistribution.html)
You now have a standalone executable that is your game. (You still need dlls and required files, but you don’t need the crazy batch script to open it with love, which is nicer on the user side)
The day I discovered VC’s requirement of unbound manifest files was the day I decided never to use their compiler again. Like, SUPER never. Forget the crazy procedures for embedding it, no more!
GCC has treated me well for well over 12 years now. We went through difficult times when the buggy 3.0 launched, but it was those hard times that brought us closer together. Thank you GCC for being there for me.