So now that i got sideloading in the simulator working i noticed another inconsistency in the simulator.
Some games only provide the ARM binaries and no DLL or .SO lib to run the game inside the simulator so when i sideload such games and run them i correctly get the error below:
however the simulator is now stuck in this state forever. If you choose unpause same error happens if your choose reset you'll get a gray screen with same error, if you close the simulator and launch it again it will automatically try to lauch the last game again in this case the game without the dll's
the only way to get out of this loop is by editing playdatesimulator.ini file and removing the entry of the last launched game so it does not autorestart it (edit: another way around it is manually loading another game that does not have this issue using file -> open)
I'm also not sure but i think this can only happen with C compiled games.
If you hold shift and then press the reload button you can escape out of a failing game and get back to the launcher. Also, if you hold shift on launch it won't try and reopen a previously loaded game. There should also be a dialog that appears to get you back to the launcher; I'll investigate why it seems like that's not showing in this case.
After doing a bit of investigation this game has a partial lua implementation; on load it does load the lua segment correctly and tries (and fails) to call update on the lua side of the app and you end up in this odd half loaded state. I'll try and think of a better way to handle this type of error.
The game itself is my own sideloaded game, but i downloaded it in the simulator using settings/ games section after having activated the simulator. Did i do something wrong Then by providing that lua file? I thought the reason it could not Found / execute the update function is because the pdz is the arm build for the playdate itself, as on the playdate sideloading same game has no issue. And when i work from visual studio with my game it seems to load a DLL and not the pdz file. Debugging from within visual studio and launching the game works fine for my c game. But it's possible i should not have included A lua file at all for my c game. My game was not the only game having this issue there we're others as Well and it seemed to be all c games that i had sideloaded through settings,games inside the simulator
Yes, when the game is sideloaded and then downloaded from our servers we are removing the 'debug' libraries. In this case, we are stripping the dll file from the game which will prevent it from running correctly in the Simulator.
ah that explains it at least thanks. So people will just have to manually download my game from itch.io or so and place the game in the disk folder of the simulator if they want to run it like this
