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An interesting experiment... — Gideros Forum

An interesting experiment...

bowerandybowerandy Guru
edited June 2013 in General questions
Folks,

I posted this in another thread but I felt it wasn't appropriate there so I'll repost it here...

Back at the end of last year, I think we'd just been told by @atilim that a port of Gideros to Windows 8 Phone wasn't likely to happen anytime soon. So I got to thinking, how difficult would it be to write a Gideros compatible Lua SDK for W8P. The idea would be to use Gideros for iOS and Android and then take the same code and run it under W8P. So, over the course of a two week period I did this.

What I decided to do was to take the Cocos2d-x (C++) framework stick a Lua interface on top of this and then write a set of Gideros compatibility classes in Lua. The point is that Cocos2d-x is available for IOS/Android and W8P (the latter thanks to an investment from Microsoft, I think).

This is how far I got (see below). The demo is under IOS because it was easy to do and I wanted to use ZeroBrane Studio as the IDE (also I didn't have a W8 phone at the time). But the idea was that the same code would run directly under W8P. Some of you might remember a demo of a game I was working on at the time that used my daughter's doodlings. Here is a sample of it working in this compatibility framework:


Note also that this is actually also running under OpenGL ES 2 (look at the startup messages in the console in the video) because that is what Cocos2d-x v2 supports. So in two weeks I had managed to get 90% of a Gideros compatible framework running that would support three mobile platforms and OGL2!! The SceneManager is in there and the GTweens all work. The hardest thing was getting Shapes to work (@atilim has done some fine work in there, I can tell you). As an aside (because it is using Dropbox to synch assets with the device) it also has a rather neat live coding feature.

Now this isn't meant to put the willies up Team Gideros. I've no intention of using this to compete with The Real Thing (i.e Gideros itself). I definitely think you have the best mobile framework out there. It was purely done as an experiment to see if W8P could possibly be supported with an existing Gideros codebase. Also, it wasn't complete and it wasn't fast enough but as a tech preview I thought it worked okay.

Why didn't I go any further with it? Well, I thought I'd better get back to actually completing the games I was meant to be writing before putting the effort in to get them to run under Windows Phone. This is still ongoing.

Before anyone asks me for the code, I'm afraid it's not in a state to give out (and also I don't want to give any idea that one could use this rather than stump up subscriptions for Gideros). I do think it was an interesting diversion though. If I ever get anything running on a real W8P then I'll let you know.

best regards

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