Running without needing the Moai library installed, Metalua causes problems

[JenniBee]

I created a game with adventure engine last year called Doug's Moai adventure (which can be found here: http://jennifermcmurray.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8

I've been trying to get help from people to get it to work without needing the Moai library to be installed, and I've had no luck so far. It works fine for people who have Moai installed, but for those who don't, it won't work (and I've tried to get it to run myself after uninstalling Moai, on several systems, and have had no luck). It appears metalua is the culprit, as I have been able to compile many programs and run them without Moai installed, but I've had no luck with programs with metalua.

Adventure engine is great, and it worked well for my game, but I'd like to be able to share it with more people, as those who aren't technologically inclined are having trouble getting it to run. Is there any way adventure engine could be used without metalua? Or if you have suggestions on how to get metalua to work well on systems without Moai installed, I'd appreciate any advice you have on that as well.

[isovector]

Wow! I had no idea anyone had ever looked at adventure, let alone written a game on it! For the last few years I've considered this project to be abandoned, but I suppose it would be poor manners to not give you any support given that you've come so far =)

I'd never gotten so far as needing to distribute any of my projects, but I had put some thought into how I'd do it:

• The MOAI build injects ths file into the binary it produces. The developers use it to add some extra library code, but we can hijack it to inject game code.
• Off-hand, I'm not so sure about this, but I'd imagine it's possible to compile metalua files to lua. Whether or not this is possible in general, it can be done for the stuff we use metalua for. Precompiling all of your source files from metalua to lua would probably make the next step run more smoothly:
• Squish (if I recall correctly) with the --virtual-io flag can compress all of your source files (game/ and src/) including assets into a single lua file.

Combined, it seems like this would let you distribute just a single executable file to people. I'll be traveling for the next few months, so I won't be able to be too much of a help, but if you figure out how to do it I'll add support directly into the engine =)

[isovector]

PS, I had a quick look through your game code, and it looks like maybe you haven't discovered the editor mode yet =)

Hitting E in the game will drop you into the editor mode, where the following commands work:

• ZZ save your changes and quit
• w change the walkable areas. When in this mode, press a to add a point where your mouse is, and x to remove the last point
• ah <n>, eh <n>, dh <h> to add, edit or delete hotspot numer <n>.

There are other cool things too which I never got around to writing documentation for, but you can see here.