I don't know if this was fixed in the meantime, but Sphere Studio crashes if I open it by opening an ssproj file. It doesn't crash immediately, though - it seems to open fine at first, but then crashes if I either try to open a different project on the Start Page or try to test the game I just opened.

I noticed that bug about a year ago, I thought I fixed it but I guess not.  It seems to be some sort of race condition, I'll have to look into it again.

All right.

I also have a feature request! Build > Package game lets you package the game as an SPK. But could we also have a Build option where it includes minisphere with it, so that there's an easily distributable package even for people who don't have minisphere?

Actually, "package game" could be a dialog box, now that I think about it. It could contain options for how you want to build the game:
- Include minisphere (or old Sphere); this will package anything into a folder when selected.
- Package game files into a single file; this will make it package the files into an SPK instead of just including the game folder.

That's a good idea, I'll look into implementing that when I'm not preoccupied with adding features to minisphere

Uh, quick update, I renamed the topic to The Sphere Studio, because it has been sort of a community project for some time now, with Lord English/Fat Cerberus's help and all.

Come to think of it, I still haven't checked in that code for the master palette yet...

@DaVince: I'm gearing up to start working on minisphere 5.0, so I'll look into that game packaging idea.  One thing I think would be really nice is if the default JS modules, etc. could be packaged into the SPK too so then you only need to distribute minisphere.exe, without the system folder.  SphereFS would make that really easy to handle in the engine since filename canonization is built into the mechanism (i.e. the relative SphereFS path is canonical).

Neat!

Edit: I posted something long here that I have moved into the minisphere thread now.

I just added a SourceMapper class to Sphere.Core to allow debugger plugins to easily remap line numbers for transpiled code.  I needed source map support to be able to switch to TypeScript in miniSphere (since it doesn't have an option to preserve line numbers), and I figured it was better to make it a generic function in the editor rather than hardcoding it into the miniSphere plugin.

I'm planning on redesigning the Start page at some point in the near future.  It's starting to look pretty antiquated these days and it doesn't scale well at all to large numbers of games, even in Details view.  I'm thinking of making it like the Visual Studio Start page, where it only shows the 5 most recent projects worked on, with some sort of feed with links to Sphere documentation, resources, and news.  (hosting can be worked out later).

Maybe someone has suggestions for this to make it even better?

That sounds like a pretty cool idea (which I'm totally gonna steal for QtSphere IDE )
Here is Qt Designer's home screen, if it gives you any inspiration.

I agree, this sounds like a good idea. A feature I tended to use a lot in the old editor was "Open Last Project", after all.

with some sort of feed with links to Sphere documentation, resources, and news.  (hosting can be worked out later).

Sounds good to me. If we're going to have a news feed, it could be used on the website too. As for resources, wiki links would be good but it requires some serious update to the wiki itself.

Just keeping it simple and clear like Qt Designer's would be a good idea, I think.

Yeah, I agree. Imitating the VS start page would be great to have. +1

Not much to report yet in terms of implemented features, but I did some minor refactoring and moved all the information strings into Sphere.Core so that they're easier to access in code (reading from AssemblyInfo.cs is very clunky) and make them easier to edit.

https://github.com/Radnen/spherestudio/blob/master/Sphere.Core/Versioning.cs

I might move the version number into Sphere.Core though, so bundled plugins can take their version numbers from there.  Then making a new version is just a matter of editing the version number in one place.   (edit: I made that change)

Tip: The latest bleeding-edge build of Sphere Studio is always included when a new miniSphere version is released.

Here's a sneak peak at the dark theme I'm working on.

Looks pretty... sublime!

It's coming along nicely.  The 3D edge effects applied by Windows are very distracting with a dark theme, I'll have to see if I can disable them.