Skip to main content
↑
↓
Spherical forums
Community for the
Sphere game engine
New?
Contact Us
to register an account!
1 Hour
1 Day
1 Week
1 Month
Forever
Community
Help
Search
Recent Posts
Log in
Contact Us
News
Spherical
Facebook
-
Twitter
-
Discord chat
New?
Contact us
to register an account!
Sphere Development
Sphere General
Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
1
Print
Topic: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
(Read 6980 times)
previous topic
-
next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
DaVince
Legendary Poster
Posts: 1,001
Logged
Administrator
Used Sphere for, like, half my life
Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
July 15, 2013, 04:22:24 pm
A cross-platform Sphere game launcher
After getting frustrated with how little you can do with startup games, I decided to write an external game launcher for Sphere instead.
It is written with
node-webkit
. This unfortunately makes the file rather big, but it makes the launcher very cross-platform and easy to modify. (Note: I'll compress the launcher file on later releases, making it at least twice smaller.)
Features
View a list of your Sphere games and launch them.
Shows information about the game from game.sgm and info.txt files.
Shows a screenshot if the game folder has a screenshot.png, an icon if it has icon.png and a video if it has a video.webm file.
Supports multiple game paths (which don't have to be near a Sphere engine file).
Written in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, so can be edited, improved and themed easily.
Instructions
Note: there's no configuration options yet, so you have to set up your game and engine paths manually.
This thing won't work until you do.
Open SpheRun.cfg
This is a JavaScript file containing some simple arrays of data right now.
Add or edit paths to Sphere game directories at CONFIG.gamepaths.
Define your game engine at CONFIG.engines. Only CONFIG.engines[0] runs at the moment.
Downloads
Current version (0.1):
Package only version
- for if you already have node-webkit and just want to download a small .nw file.
Windows
Linux
(32-bit)
OSX (untested)
Future plans
0.2
===
Proper config file support (INI or JSON?)
Add a configuration menu (with link in the header)
- Engines
- Games
- Whether or not to use Wine (Linux/OSX)?
Make this menu show on first run
Add an engine selector in the header
0.3
===
Keep track of whether or not the engine is running and disable the launch button
Keyboard support (arrows, enter, ?)
Open an engine's config.exe
0.4
===
Add editors to configuration menu
Open game with editor
Open editor
0.5
===
Functionally replace config.exe
Theming support
Ideas after 1.0
===============
Get data from an online database of game info?
Browse data resources (using sphere-web-tools)?
License
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported
Spherical Downloads Repo
||
My (really old) Sphere stuff
Radnen
Big Chungus
Posts: 1,440
Sphere Studio Developer
Logged
Senior Staff
Wise Warrior
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #1
–
July 15, 2013, 05:51:11 pm
I get a failed to extract archive message when running it in OSX.
If you use code to help you code you can use less code to code. Also, I have approximate knowledge of many things.
Sphere-sfml
here
Sphere Studio editor
here
DaVince
Legendary Poster
Posts: 1,001
Logged
Administrator
Used Sphere for, like, half my life
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #2
–
July 15, 2013, 06:40:37 pm
Hmm, I might have put the source files in the wrong location, then. Could you go into the node-webkit.app directory and move everything but the Contents dir one directory up (so in the same location where nwsnapshot is)?
Spherical Downloads Repo
||
My (really old) Sphere stuff
Radnen
Big Chungus
Posts: 1,440
Sphere Studio Developer
Logged
Senior Staff
Wise Warrior
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #3
–
July 15, 2013, 06:43:07 pm
I don't get it, how do you do that? I only see two files: 'node-webkit' and 'nwsnapshot'. Is there a way of physically entering them?
If you use code to help you code you can use less code to code. Also, I have approximate knowledge of many things.
Sphere-sfml
here
Sphere Studio editor
here
DaVince
Legendary Poster
Posts: 1,001
Logged
Administrator
Used Sphere for, like, half my life
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #4
–
July 15, 2013, 06:46:59 pm
node-webkit would be the .app I mentioned. It's actually a regular folder, I'm sure OSX "sees" it as a runnable app instead, though. Maybe you can cd into it or get into it with a right-click or something?
Edit: for now, try getting the package only version in the downloads and
grab a copy of node-webkit
. Then put the nw file in the same path as the node-webkit app. I'm going to try and fix the zip I uploaded but uploading will take a while, so...
Last Edit
: July 15, 2013, 06:49:44 pm by DaVince
Spherical Downloads Repo
||
My (really old) Sphere stuff
Radnen
Big Chungus
Posts: 1,440
Sphere Studio Developer
Logged
Senior Staff
Wise Warrior
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #5
–
July 15, 2013, 06:59:31 pm
It worked when I moved the contents up a level.
If you use code to help you code you can use less code to code. Also, I have approximate knowledge of many things.
Sphere-sfml
here
Sphere Studio editor
here
DaVince
Legendary Poster
Posts: 1,001
Logged
Administrator
Used Sphere for, like, half my life
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #6
–
July 15, 2013, 07:01:49 pm
Awesome, I had a hunch it would. The download has been fixed.
Spherical Downloads Repo
||
My (really old) Sphere stuff
N E O
Hero Poster
Posts: 585
Making it happen!
Logged
Administrator
Senior Administrator
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #7
–
July 16, 2013, 05:00:28 pm
Created
GitHub repo
for the launcher, DaVince. Push your code there!
DaVince
Legendary Poster
Posts: 1,001
Logged
Administrator
Used Sphere for, like, half my life
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #8
–
July 16, 2013, 06:15:27 pm
Done, thanks for that!
Spherical Downloads Repo
||
My (really old) Sphere stuff
N E O
Hero Poster
Posts: 585
Making it happen!
Logged
Administrator
Senior Administrator
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #9
–
July 20, 2013, 06:40:38 pm
Question - for posterity and as a "just in case," do we want to provide a XULRunner version of the launcher that uses Gecko instead of WebKit? Mozilla's finally gotten their act together and realized sometimes people just want Gecko webapps without all the heft of the Firefox chrome and is once again maintaining up-to-date XULRunner downloads.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XULRunner
(latest at posting is XULRunner 22.0, presumably same features as Firefox 22.0)
What XULRunner provides
DaVince
Legendary Poster
Posts: 1,001
Logged
Administrator
Used Sphere for, like, half my life
Re: Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)
Reply #10
–
July 22, 2013, 07:07:28 pm
Not sure - how different is it from node-webkit? I'll need to look into the base file size, too, and its capabilities in loading local files and running local processes. Depending how they match up to each other I might just make a full switch.
But I'll need to take some time for this tomorrow.
Last Edit
: July 22, 2013, 07:26:12 pm by DaVince
Spherical Downloads Repo
||
My (really old) Sphere stuff
1
Print
Sphere Development
Sphere General
Sphere game launcher: SpheRun (v0.1)