Creating Standalone Neko Games on Windows and Linux

Posted on 2015-02-26

Tagged with: Haxe

While prototyping a pluggable-architecture in my post on Neko Plugin Architecture With Reflection, I frequently built my games to work against the neko target (and no other). While manageable, that begs the question: how can I release a single zip that contains my game, without requiring users to install Neko themselves?

On Windows

On Windows, Neko does a great job of linking to libraries in the current directory. When I build my Haxeflixel game against the neko target on Windows, copy it to a clean VM, and run it, Neko complains about these three files missing (in order):

• std.ndll (Haxe standard library)
• regexp.ndll (Haxe regular expressions library)
• zlib.dll (ZLib)

Copying them over gives me a working, stand-alone game! The rest of my code builds as a standard HaxeFlixel game.

On Linux

Neko is less forgiving on Linux. Neko on Linux doesn't search the current path for the Neko DLLs, despite $loader_path including ./ and @executable_path. Fortunately, Ibilon pointed me to an easy work-around:

• Create a run.sh executable script
• In your script, set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the current directory and call your executable

Here's what mine looks like:

#!/bin/sh
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$( pwd )
./GameExecutable

Like Windows, you need to include the std.ndll, regexp.ndll, and zlib.dll files with your executable. This gives you a working, stand-alone game! And yes, you're telling Neko where to look for the Neko libraries (the current directory). That's okay.

Eventually, perhaps a new version of Neko will emerge, one that looks in the current directory for the libraries. Until then, this is good enough for me.