Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: Future of Sphere: Nomenclature in 2018 and beyond (Read 80404 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 3 Guests are viewing this topic.

Future of Sphere: Nomenclature in 2018 and beyond

I have not officially returned to these boards just yet, but I wanted to pop in here and, spurred on by discussion on the Spherical Discord, clarify some information regarding referring to Sphere and its associated projects conversationally and officially.

  • While Sphere and its official website was originally hosted on SourceForge (which still contains the original code history and a more or less frozen version of the original website), the code itself and the code of various Sphere-related projects is now most currently up to date on GitHub under the "sphere-group" organization and repositories of various members of that group, and Spherical is the official website for Sphere, its related projects, and its community.
  • The current official implementation of the Sphere engine is miniSphere. The classic 1.5/1.6b engine should either be referred to by version number, by Legacy or Sphere Legacy, or by Classic or Sphere Classic, though the "Vanilla" moniker may occasionally be found in references.
  • Ownership of Sphere the engine, Sphere the API, and certain related projects is currently nominally assigned to the "Sphere Group" which consists of certain Sphere-compatible engine devs and certain Sphere game devs and is currently led by me, Alex Rosario, aka Apollolux or NeoLogiX, in order to prevent the stagnation and deprecation that comes with single-person ownership of the projects. Ownership of Sphere as the name of a game engine that uses JavaScript as its scripting language, belongs to Chad Austin unless otherwise noted.
  • Any future game engine projects are welcome to add Sphere-like APIs to it, but the engine will only be considered "Sphere-compatible" if it runs projects written for Sphere 1.5 or higher (either natively or through a translation layer of some sort) and either uses Sphere API-compatible JavaScript or a language that compiles, translates, or otherwise "trans-piles" to Sphere API-compatible JavaScript.

Regarding development history, there have been many people who have been involved in the direct development and testing of the various iterations of the Sphere engine. Many names escape me at the moment, but a good portion of that list can be found within the original editor's code. For historical reference and purposes, Chad Austin (AegisKnight) is the original creator of the thing, Brian Robb (Flikky) was then the most prolific developer of it and its updates along with a handful of other developers, and eventually after changing hands multiple times the overarching project as a whole is now currently maintained by me, Alex Rosario. Bruce Pascoe (Fat Cerberus) is the creator and lead developer of the current official Sphere implementation, miniSphere. Any nominal credits beyond the aforementioned would likely require some better research.

There may be separate posts or docs outlining terms beyond the above, such as clarifying licensing of engine-related names or commercial usage.