Hi there y'all. 

I want to do unit-tests... I find that non taxing (you sit down, write one for one hour, and it works for ever!) and important work. With some sources I have.

It is nice to see so many still here. I will try to get more involved, but alas, I have very little time (and with all the hanging projects, like WoaS, even less).

Anyway.... HELLO!

Whoa, FBnil! Nice to see you around here! As you may have noticed, there's a few reimplementations of Sphere in the works right now. Maybe you'll have more luck trying to compile TurboSphere for different platforms (though it's still heavily in development)?

It's good to see you again!

TurboSphere works quite well on Linux, I do most of my developing on Linux. It's only limited to ARM, x86, and MIPS processors, and any OS that SDL or SDL2 can run on.

Welcome FBN!! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with. It's good to have more activity, since we've been having little of late.

I've been reading up a lot for 2 days now. Had to open up a mindmap to write down all active forks we have for Sphere... a whopping 7!
I'm trying not to get sucked into the engine again, and actually start doing something about the game coding I had planned... uhm... more than 10 years ago... when I found Sphere 1.3
For now I'm testing each fork for neatness and functionality. Once I settle for one, Ill start writing test cases. Once that is done, Ill start reading my old libraries again, undusting them, and start again on the project. It is hard, because my latest were on a laptop that blew up... I connected the harddisk to a usb interface and it went poof. I have backups, but they are never the latest. And so, the storyboard is incomplete, and I lost lots of plot ideas.  No matter, they were cheesy anyway, but still I had funny ideas....

Here's some more info for ya:

- JavaSphere doesn't really seem in development anymore.
- There's no progress on any web-based engines right now.
- Minisphere is making the most progress and seems to be the most stable/complete. I'd personally consider it the prime candidate for further Sphere development (yes, even over TurboSphere, sorry FJ! ).

And as the developer of SSFML, I say, use minisphere too. At first I was skeptical he would surpass the amount of features I tried to get to work in a new Sphere port (I was the first to get a fully working modern Sphere version running that played most games). Then he did surpass me and the rest is history.

I'm likely going to convert the SSFML project into something different. I might make it a sister project to Sphere, a tool used to create MMO games. SphereMMO or something like that, which only exists on Windows computers. But then again I'm sure minisphere would just create a networking API that handles MMO's for you.

Technically you can do your own networking code, but an engine + API (a networked map engine for instance) would aid in reducing the amount of boilerplate code you'd need to write to get that started up. Mostly, I'll be creating a server side node.js library for interacting with it.

MMOs are hard.  I'm not ruling out the possibility, but it would be a ways off I think.  I'd have to be REALLY bored and have no bugs to fix to even consider it.

Then again, i implemented a lot of things I said were a ways off within a week of mentioning them, so who knows?

Well I wouldn't target full MMO just yet. I'd focus on getting network play games going and then branch out from there. But yeah, the SSFML project has got to change if I want to do something different with it. No point in having multiple Sphere engines unless we like the idea of having a Windows only Sphere version that can meet the performance needs of certain games.

So far my SSFML is the only engine fast enough to run my space game with decent number of enemy AI's. So there is that angle to it.

And as the developer of SSFML, I say, use minisphere too. At first I was skeptical he would surpass the amount of features I tried to get to work in a new Sphere port (I was the first to get a fully working modern Sphere version running that played most games). Then he did surpass me and the rest is history.

They all thought I was crazy.  "It can't be done." they'd say.  "Just give up." they'd say.  But I paid them no mind--in fact, I relished the challenge.  And now look where we are.

In all seriousness though, minisphere happened for two reasons: Duktape being braindead simple to embed and Allegro being... well, awesome.  Honestly almost the entire minisphere API that isn't a part of the map engine is literally just a thin wrapper over some Allegro function or other.  Which honestly puts me on a bit of thin ice; if Allegro ever became unstable, the thing would fall apart at the seams.  Luckily it has proven to be a very stable foundation thus far.  I've flushed out a grand total of about 4 Allegro bugs over 5 months of continuous development atop it (much of it on the WIP branch even!).  That's honestly very impressive.

Of course it also helped that I had access to pretty much the entire existing Sphere catalog (in theory at least--we lost a lot in the crash) for compatibility testing.   Plus I was determined to get Specs running at 100% (the bugs in Sphere 1.5 had gotten to be showstoppers, I had no choice if that project was going to succeed), so that was a big motivator too.  It's funny, I used to think emulator developers had it bad, having all the tedious work of making things compatible right down to the CPU level.  But reverse engineering Sphere and getting the same functionality to work identically in an engine built from scratch was some of the most rewarding programming work I've ever done.  The first time I got In the Steps of the Blackfoot to open to the map screen in minisphere... well, it was awesome.

Of course I'd be lying if I said minisphere was developed ex nihilo.  It was based on a lot of past hobby work making game engines.  Spectacles has quite a storied history that I'll have to get into some other time, but suffice to say I have a LOT of experience writing native-code tilemap engines. Even Scenario was based on past work on the plotscripting language for SuperSpeedGE, an RPG Maker clone I made way back in high school.  It was quite powerful, but I never did finish the battle system for it, so it eventually fizzled out.  So in many ways, minisphere was, to quote my namesake, ALREADY HERE.