Just thought I'd give a quick heads up, there's an effort underway to make Oozaru a first-class member of the Sphere toolkit. In a future version the plan is that you will continue to be able to test your game on miniSphere with full debugging support etc., but the final distribution target will be fully Oozaru-ready.

I'm currently working on TypeScript integration for Sphere 5.6. This will make it so cell init creates a TS-enabled project. Initial experiments are going well, though there remain some kinks to work out. It doesn't seem like it will be too painful though, and most of the work was already done with my earlier ts-sphere project. The goal is to get it to behave as much like native tsc as possible, without the need to install Node.js or npm first. Just a tsc() call in your Cellscript.

The rebranding of miniSphere to Sphere is now fully complete! https://github.com/fatcerberus/sphere

The engine itself has also been renamed, to neoSphere.  But unlike with miniSphere, that name no longer takes center stage: It's simply the name of the engine implementation, to differentiate it from other implementations of the Sphere API such as Oozaru.

For anyone who still cares: Sphere 5.6.2 is available for both Windows and macOS.

Stellar work once again!

So... I downloaded the latest SphereStudio and I can't find the map editor or sprite editor or anything really. I see there's a project tree and a task manager but I don't understand any of it or what's it for? Should I still use the older version of Sphere?

Unless you somehow managed to disable all the plugins, the map editor, etc. should be there, you just have to click New -> Map, etc.  If you open an existing Sphere 1.x project with it you can also edit the maps, spritesets, etc. that are there (that's what the project tree is for).

I don't recommend using the old editor if you want to take advantage of the new API in neoSphere, but for what it's worth I am actively working on improving the user experience in Sphere Studio, there are admittedly some rough edges and I'd like to make things more seamless.

neoSphere 5.7.0 has been released:
https://github.com/spheredev/neosphere/releases/tag/v5.7.0

5.8.0 is out, adding static functions for directly constructing basic transforms, e.g. Transform.scale(2.0, 2.0) returns a 2x scaling matrix, skipping the new Transform() step.

Neato.

the next release will add a bunch of eaty pigs that eat all your code after you write it so maybe be prepared for that

also the pigs will increase the size of the download by approximately 812pB^[1]because pigs are super morbidly obese and also fat

¹ 1 pigabyte = *MUNCH*↵

if anyone's wondering why the 5.9.1 release is missing the eaty pigs I promised it's because of an unexpected pig shortage... basically what happened is at the last minute all the pigs ate each other before I could get the release out.  on the plus side there were literally hundreds of pigs and someone apparently slipped them Red Bull so it was really, really funny to watch^[1]

¹ but not nearly as funny as the farmer who sucked up several pigs with a straw and then exploded↵

You've done fantastic work, Fat Cerberus! I do try to log in once every month or so. With the rise of so many indie games, I'm still surprised Sphere hasn't grown too much... I first found out about it on... sourceforge! Believe it or not, haha. I'm just glad to see miniSphere still gets some work on it every once and a while.

I'm just glad to see miniSphere still gets some work on it every once and a while.

Yeah, I don't have a lot of motivation to do feature work anymore, now that the engine is feature-complete^[1] (I'm primarily motivated by necessity, which makes hobbies hard), but I do try to keep up with fixing bugs that people find.

That said, I'm quite proud of accomplishing the initial goal I set when I started working on neoSphere which was to make the "true" Sphere 2.0, backwards compatibility and all.  I probably went above and beyond on that, to a fault even - in that the v1 and v2 APIs aren't mutually exclusive and it's completely possible to mix them in the same codebase.

¹ This even extends to Oozaru, as despite technically not being feature-complete yet, enough is implemented to run Specs so it might as well be...↵

neoSphere 5.9.3 is out but I don't know why I'm posting that here since the forums are deader than the skeleton guys from coco and even if someone found the site on google new user registration is disabled anyway

and it's not even an important release anyway