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Topic: Need a working Linux and/or Mac build of Studio or editor (Read 98567 times) previous topic - next topic
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Need a working Linux and/or Mac build of Studio or editor

My college supposedly offers a "JavaScript Game Programming" course that would count as a computer science elective if was actually staffed and students could register for it. I'm going to contact the comp sci department chair to petition to not only have someone teach that course so they can actually have an open section for a change, but also to be the one to teach it (and if I'm lucky would count as my "capstone" project as well).

If I am the one to be teaching the course I almost certainly would use Sphere as the engine since minisphere now catalyzes its multi-platform capabilities and it might even give me some extra motivation to clean up the web version.

As such, I would like to request a stable, preferably native, Linux and/or Mac build of a Sphere editor, either the original or Sphere Studio. I expect that, if the course is approved and I'm teaching it using Sphere, there is a much higher than normal likelihood that students would use a non-Windows OS. I'd also like to request confirmation that the Windows editors would work on Windows 8 and/or 10. The sooner we can confirm working editors the sooner I can have some ammo in my belt to tip the scales in favor of getting this class open for this fall.

Re: Need a working Linux and/or Mac build of Studio or editor

Reply #1 –
I've heard that that the vanilla editor doesn't play nice with Windows 10 for whatever reason.  Studio works great on Win10 and should work just fine on Win7/8 as well as long as your .NET framework is up to date.

Unfortunately, getting Sphere Studio to run on Linux has proven to be an exercise in futility.  Under Mono it terminates immediately and won't even start up, and it just barely gets going under Wine--until you try to open a file, at which point it locks up hard forcing you to kill the process.  And I have no idea how to debug it.

For what it's worth Sphere Studio is definitely recommended for use with minisphere since you get the debugger functionality, and minisphere 3.0 of course has SSJ, giving you a cross-platform debugger (albeit a command-line one).  Which is naturally a great boon for a course teaching JS programming. :)
 

Re: Need a working Linux and/or Mac build of Studio or editor

Reply #3 –
I'd also really like this.. working on a Mac makes Sphere dev almost impossible.

But an IDE is not necessarily required.. it would be nice if we could make some cross platform tools to convert to/from Sphere formats, and a Tiled export plugin.

Re: Need a working Linux and/or Mac build of Studio or editor

Reply #4 –
@casiotone: Format conversion is the problem Cell is meant to solve, unfortunately it's still very barebones.  All it can do is package files as-is, generate a Sphere manifest (.sgm/.s2gm) and compress it all into an SPK optionally embedding an SSJ source map.  I'd like to flesh it out some more but SSJ development is taking all my time right now.  Maybe I'll be able to do something before minisphere 3.0 release, otherwise it'll have to wait till v3.1.

Re: Need a working Linux and/or Mac build of Studio or editor

Reply #5 –
Even porting 1.5 editor's conversion functions to some cross-platform command line utilities (I think I started to do this once, but forgot if I ever made progress) will be better than nothing for my purposes; image-to-spriteset and image-to-map+tiles are much more important than font conversion, since we can use either system fonts or my fonts if needed.

I'll also need to fix my Sphere format viewer app to read maps+tiles properly and update the byuu libraries to the most recent version, which will theoretically allow better compilation on Mac and Linux.

Re: Need a working Linux and/or Mac build of Studio or editor

Reply #6 –
Yeah, making sprite/tilesets from images is meant to be one of Cell's functions.  I'll see if I can fit it in for minisphere 3.0. :)