As you know, this blog is more focused on sharing code snippets than on teaching, so today I’m going to show you something I recently discovered.
If you’ve been following me, you know I’ve been working in my free time on a 2D game engine where creators can build games using only Lua — and I’d say, even fairly complex ones.
Right now, I’m working on a point-and-click game that you can play here: https://bereprobate.com/. It’s built using this same engine, and I’m publishing builds in parallel to Steam and the Web using GitHub Actions.
The thing is, Steam — which is the main target platform for this game — supports achievements, and I want to include them. But to use achievements, you have to link the Steam library to your engine. The problem is, doing that creates a dependency on that library in the binaries, which I don’t want. I also don’t want to maintain a separate build just for that.
Then I thought: “Why not load the Steam library dynamically? Use LoadLibraryA on Windows and dlopen on macOS. (Sorry Linux — it’s Proton-only for now.)”
I tried the experiment below, and it worked. If the DLL/dylib is present, the Steam features work just fine. If not, everything runs normally.
delduca•6mo ago
If you’ve been following me, you know I’ve been working in my free time on a 2D game engine where creators can build games using only Lua — and I’d say, even fairly complex ones.
Right now, I’m working on a point-and-click game that you can play here: https://bereprobate.com/. It’s built using this same engine, and I’m publishing builds in parallel to Steam and the Web using GitHub Actions.
The thing is, Steam — which is the main target platform for this game — supports achievements, and I want to include them. But to use achievements, you have to link the Steam library to your engine. The problem is, doing that creates a dependency on that library in the binaries, which I don’t want. I also don’t want to maintain a separate build just for that.
Then I thought: “Why not load the Steam library dynamically? Use LoadLibraryA on Windows and dlopen on macOS. (Sorry Linux — it’s Proton-only for now.)”
I tried the experiment below, and it worked. If the DLL/dylib is present, the Steam features work just fine. If not, everything runs normally.