(This topic has been split off from this: http://forums.spheredev.org/index.php/topic,96.0.html)

(After finding out the startup game couldn't reach the files I wanted to reach...)
Bleh. Well, that's too bad. At least the startup game should have been able to.

I'm thinking of writing something Wx-based instead, then. When I get the time.

That said, what you are doing reminds me of a game player in .NET that I made. What it was crucial for was detecting your monitor resolutions and writing to the .sgm the correct best fir for your monitor. It was in my StarFront game, which you can check out on my website (needs Windows OS tho).

Interesting, I'll check it out. Was thinking of making something Python-based myself, if that proves to be properly cross-platform at least.

I was planning on making a simple Java based starter game and config tool for TurboSphere, myself. You can't beat Java for cross-platform support.

Hmm, yeah, but I wanted to keep the launcher light and quick to start up. Well, I don't really have that much time to be making it this week, anyway...

I was planning on making a simple Java based starter game and config tool for TurboSphere, myself. You can't beat Java for cross-platform support.

C beats Java flat cross-platform wise. Anything with a pure C VM (e.g. Lua) is likely to be at least as portable as Java as well.

Perhaps I will try making a launcher in Common Lisp, its cross-platform support is good enough for this purpose.

I split off the discussion about creating new launchers into a new thread, since I wanted to continue the discussion on this.

So I recently found this:

https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit

It's based on Node.js and WebKit. It basically lets you code cross-platform desktop applications with browser technology. Seems very useful to me (as you can just load and manipulate local files synchonously and with ease, for example).

I'm currently trying to create a Sphere game launcher with it, see how that goes. It seems like a fairly good solution to me. The only downside seems to be the file size, but that can be partially subverted with a binary compressor like UPX (it seems to work well on node-webkit...).

Can it be used to create standalone web-sphere games?

You know, I was thinking about that. It's a self-contained full browser, so it seems like it would to me.

Not sure what the policy settings are on local files loaded through jQuery's $.get() though, because that fails in a normal browser. I could try to run NEO's stuff in it as a test.
If that fails, though, the Node.js part offers file loading, any way. Sync *and* async.

EDIT: it works, without any modifications. This could really work as a HTML-based standalone Sphere interpreter and as a test bed for locally testing Neo's web-sphere-utilities.

That excellent news! I could even try to test JSIL in it.

Fantastic! I knew node-webkit would eventually be useful to the advancement and proliferation of Sphere