Hmm. See, on the one hand, Sphere being so open is what makes our very small community so great. Nobody ever hides their code or be's stingy with their knowledge. At the same time, however, that very openness prevents Sphere from gaining a wider following -- if anyone can edit your game, you can't have any secrets, and importantly, you can't sell a game you made in Sphere (someone would just copy-paste the code).

I'm not so sure about that. You could still sell your games from a legal standpoint. And if you use SPKs, you get a model that's pretty similar to the LOVE game engine for example, which seems to be doing quite all right in popularity. Heck, you could even create encrypted archived data and decrypt it yourself in some JS file or external executable.

But yeah, I do think some more work in this area can really help Sphere. That, and some long-standing usability and cross-platform issues.

Indeed it would, the only thing that makes me wonder is whether releasing a closed-source Sphere game would conflict with Sphere's GPL license.

It shouldn't... All of the game data you make is yours, and you can distribute it in any way you want. As for the Sphere engine and its system scripts, an unmodified version of it can be bundled just fine with your game. If you change the Sphere binary or system scripts, making the source of these available is enough to be in the clear.

Hmm. See, on the one hand, Sphere being so open is what makes our very small community so great. Nobody ever hides their code or be's stingy with their knowledge. At the same time, however, that very openness prevents Sphere from gaining a wider following -- if anyone can edit your game, you can't have any secrets, and importantly, you can't sell a game you made in Sphere (someone would just copy-paste the code).

I'm not so sure about that. You could still sell your games from a legal standpoint. And if you use SPKs, you get a model that's pretty similar to the LOVE game engine for example, which seems to be doing quite all right in popularity. Heck, you could even create encrypted archived data and decrypt it yourself in some JS file or external executable.

But yeah, I do think some more work in this area can really help Sphere. That, and some long-standing usability and cross-platform issues.

Then again, once browser-based Sphere is up and running, that pretty much solves the issue. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can hide the files from the end-user so they can't download and view/modify them when you host stuff online, right? Otherwise people would just be able to Save Page on things like Facebook games and browser games like Realm of the Mad God, and have the source code and post it all back up.

*sigh*

If only Save As-ing worked. Pokemon Dream World, how I adore you. And it's closing down so soon ;_; And nobody else likes it, apparently, so nobody's gonna make any attempts to make pirate versions.

Then again, once browser-based Sphere is up and running, that pretty much solves the issue. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you can hide the files from the end-user so they can't download and view/modify them when you host stuff online, right? Otherwise people would just be able to Save Page on things like Facebook games and browser games like Realm of the Mad God, and have the source code and post it all back up.

It's not the same. The scripting languages of those sites all generate run on the server, and just serve the generated HTML to you. A browser implementation of Sphere would likely work with JavaScript, which is a language that your own browser runs, not the server. You can view the source of JS files perfectly fine. It's also easier since you can just interpret Sphere's original JS files without going through crazy hoops.

But SPK could be implemented. It makes things complicated, but it would work. In the end, you'd still have something unpacking the SPK and viewing the data, though.

Huh. Never knew that. I always thought it was possible to serve Javascript files without giving the end-user access to them.

Oh well, this is all academic. It's not like I'm gonna need to hide any files from anyone.

Not possible, unless you use JS purely to generate HTML of some kind and have some server-side parsing done. You'd lose any and all interactivity (animation, mouse events, etc. etc).

You can obfuscate the code, though, but it's still reverse engineerable to an extent (the extent is: variables are renamed to messy, unclear stuff, so those can't be named back to what they used to be before obfuscating).