Publish your games directly to Steam with the Leadwerks game player
One of the coolest things I'm seeing in Leadwerks 3 is a lot of minigames being made. These are finished products, without super high expectations, but they are complete, don't take long to make, and some are quite fun. Seeing these gave me an idea for a feature that's been in development in the background for some time, and when you see what it does, it will explain some of the design decisions I've made over the last few months.
The next build on the beta branch on Steam will support Lua sandboxing. Lua games can be sandboxed by passing "-sandbox" in the command line. This prevents the application from accessing file write and OS commands, and prevents Lua from loading external libraries. When games are launched from the editor, this is turned on by default:
Why is this cool? Sandboxing makes Lua code safe to run on any computer. Along with assets, games can now be published in the Steam Workshop beta. The editor has a new game player that lets you select a game you are subscribed to and play it, like the ones below from YouGroove and Rick:
This minimizes the editor window and launches the Lua executable found in the "Templates\Lua" folder. The selected game is passed to the executable in the command line, and the executable loads all game assets, scripts, and maps from an encrypted zip file containing the game contents. Because our own executable is being run with only sandboxed Lua code, it's safe to run any game in the Workshop. And most of the Lua games found in the downloads section of this site work with no changes, due to the stability and backwards compatibility of the Leadwerks 3 API.
We're filling the Workshop with content right now, including assets from "The Zone" project from Leadwerks 2, as well as third party content from popular artists. When the Workshop launches next month, you will also be able to publish your Lua games straight to Steam, with no approval process and no waiting period. You can update your game at any time to keep all your fans up to date, and you can safely play other people's games while always running the latest build of the Leadwerks executable.
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