Limit Theory

Limit Theory is a now-cancelled open world space simulation game.

This repository is the game (not engine) code for the second generation of LT's development, when all work was migrated to C and Lua. For the older, C++/LTSL Limit Theory, see https://github.com/JoshParnell/ltheory-old.

Prerequisites

To build Limit Theory, you'll need a few standard developer tools. All of them are available to download for free.

• Python: https://www.python.org/downloads/
• Git: https://git-scm.com/downloads
• Git LFS: https://git-lfs.github.com/
• Visual Studio Community: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/
• CMake: https://cmake.org/download/

Building

With the above prerequisites installed, open a Git Bash terminal.

Checking out the Repository

First, use cd to change directories to the place where you want to download LT.

• cd ~/Desktop/<path where you want to put the LT source>

Before doing any other git commands, make sure LFS is installed:

• git lfs install

You should see Git LFS initialized or a similar message. Important: if you forget to install and initialize Git LFS, most of the resources will probably be broken, and the whole process will likely fail in strange and mysterious ways. This is a common gotcha with projects that use LFS. Make sure you do the above step!

Now, you can download the repository:

• git clone --recursive https://github.com/JoshParnell/ltheory.git ltheory

Compiling

Once you have the repository, the build process proceeds in two steps (as with other CMake builds): generating the build files, and then building. There is a Python script configure.py at the top level of the repository to help you do this easily.

From a terminal in the directory of the checked-out repository, run

• python configure.py

This runs CMake to generate the build files. Then, to compile,

• python configure.py build

Running a Lua App

If the compilation is successful, you now have bin/lt64.exe, which is the main executable. This program launches a Lua script. The intention was for Limit Theory (and all mods) to be broken into many Lua scripts, which would then implement the gameplay, using script functions exposed by the underlying engine.

To launch a Lua script, you can again use the python helper:

• python configure.py run

To run the default script ('LTheory'), or

• python configure.py run <script_name_without_extension>

to run a specific script. All top-level scripts are in the script/App directory.

Example of the Entire Process

An example of the entire sequence of commands to run LT, starting from nothing (but having the prerequisites installed):

Open Git Bash. Each line below is one command, some of which will take a while to complete:

cd ~/Desktop
git lfs install
git clone --recursive https://github.com/JoshParnell/ltheory.git ltheory
cd ltheory
python configure.py
python configure.py build
python configure.py run