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Hello all, from a mac user

Hello all,

I'm a long time javascript developer ( ~15 years ) and would love to create games using ... javascript for my children. The real language with existing libraries ( box2d, GSAP ) and not some small subset of the language or javascript-ish language. I'm having some issues building from source on my mac however I did see someone did a build for OS X 10.12 or higher so while I wait as my computer is being backed up and I can upgrade the OS I thought I would say hi and ask a few questions.

1. Android support ( I think I saw that it's possible but not an option now ) but I wanted to ask if it's still being considered.
2. Raspberry pi support ... is this an option today? If so any idea on framerates for action-y games.
3. Packaging up a completed game for macs... is this doable?
4. Any youtube videos of games, game development, workflow, debugging would help. Searching for "sphere" and "game engine/runtime/js/whatever" turns up so much noise about creating a 3d sphere.

Anyways keep up the good work, the javascript world is exploding and I would love to see more JS developers play around with game development in their "native" language.

Re: Hello all, from a mac user

Reply #1 –
Always good to see new members, welcome to spheredev.

Firstly on macOs support - miniSphere's source is fully macOs compatiable, just the provided makefile is not and you need to sort out some dependencies before you can build it; I have an xcode project that does it but it's just rather messy so I haven't posted the project, I'm intending to make a clean version at some point to be added to the github repo but it hasn't been my priortiy; I've only done macOs Sierra builds as Sierra is what I use and I've had almost no interest from anyone else in the mac version; I could make a build for an older version of macOs if you'd like? (will be most of a day until I can do it as I'm about to go to work).

On your other questions:
1.Android support is an idea, it could be a reality in maybe a year's time - it's no ones priority right now and would require this to be resolved first: https://github.com/Microsoft/ChakraCore/issues/3966

2. Raspberry pi I don't think we've even thought about - it should be possible but would need someone to do some work to make it work.

3. Depends what you mean by packaging - my current build of miniSphere is designed to be dev friendly - it runs with it's "system" resources in a folder with it so (so you can look at them etc) it's not quite the macOs dream of a drag and drop .app - your game can be packaged as one file that can then be opened with miniSphere on a different computer (or shipped in the same folder as miniSphere and named so miniSphere will auto-open it on launch) - with some minor tweaks to the source of miniSphere (literally two lines) I could make it work as .app bundle with the game inside it - that version wouldn't be so usable for development but I do intend to add such a version in the future as an extra build for releasing games with.

4. There's not much, the Sphere community seemed to dry up quite badly over the last couple of years we're hoping to give it a new shot of life shortly with all the new features coming in miniSphere 5 as well as some work I'm doing on a library of modules that should make game development with modern style JS easier/more intuitive - demo videos could be something for us to do over the next few weeks.

(note when I say "we" above at the moment miniSphere effectively has two developers @Fat Cerberus and me - Fat Cerberus writes the miniSphere code and I find problems with it for him to fix + make it work on macOs + sometimes help fix things + write lots of JS that I'm hoping will be a useful standard lib of sorts to go with it)
 

Re: Hello all, from a mac user

Reply #2 –
First off, welcome to Spherical! Sphere itself is in a transitional phase and definitely still needs a lot of love on the editor and tutorial side, so I wish I got more to offer there.

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4. Any youtube videos of games, game development, workflow, debugging would help. Searching for "sphere" and "game engine/runtime/js/whatever" turns up so much noise about creating a 3d sphere.
The wiki is a good start, although mind you most of it is geared towards the legacy API (which still works and will keep working for the time being anyway).

Game development is generally talked about right here in these forums, as well as in our Discord channel (which I see you've joined already, nice!). The Twitter page contains a lot of screenshots and links to games made in the game engine. The Downloads Drive contains assets, scripts, games, demos etc. and is generally a good resource to get acquainted with Sphere as well.

As for videos; that's a thing I've been thinking about, but back when Sphere was most popular YouTube didn't even exist so you're going to find precious little.
All I know about is this shoddy sprite editor video I made years ago, on the old editor (which is the only feasible editor on OSX anyway): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jt8r-KKPkU