How does `love.platform` work?

[appsforartists]

This project plus my disdain for rebuying copies of things I have has nerd sniped me.

I tried using LÖVE on Linux to run a copy of Balatro I downloaded from Game Pass (#153). It appears there's a native bridge love.platform that exposes functions such as getLocalPlayerName/Avatar, load/writeSaveGame, and setOnSaveInitializedCallback. love.platform is missing when I try to run the Windows game in Linux, which causes the game to crash immediately.

Presumably, there's an implementation of that bridge for {Steam, Nintendo, Google Play, Xbox PC, etc.}, which is what allows the game to e.g. read/write the save file to the expected location. I see that you disable achievements in Patching.cs, but I haven't found anything else in this repo that handles those platform-specific dependencies.

(I also looked in @nkahoang's PortMaster port, but unless that platform is baked into the LÖVE ARM SO, I don't see it there either).

How do you handle love.platform? How is the Steam version able to run on Android and e.g. know where to write save games?

I suspect I could write a patch that provides default Linux implementations of the platform stub, but I'm surprised that the other porting repos don't seem to be doing that.

[appsforartists]

I found the history of Balatro and learned that the game was originally written for Steam, and then ported to other platforms when the publisher picked it up. This reinforced my hunch that the Steam version of the game (the one used by all the community ports) might predate love.platform.

I found copies of the Batocera and Nintendo builds on the Internet Archive and poked around them. Sure enough, there's not a single love.platform in either of them.

I suspect it might appear in the next big Balatro update. It's too useful of an abstraction to just live in a fork, unless LocalThunk has the original Steam codebase and all the ports are maintained downstream. At that time, the community will need to write its own bridges for its ports.