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.
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.