Old Blog Site!

It's been a while since we wrote a blog post (sorry about that!) but we haven’t been idle! Since the last update we’ve released all these new versions of Gideros:

2016.10

2016.12

2016.12.1

2017.2

2017.3

In this post I will try to summarise all the changes. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do so let’s get started!

Gideros 2016.10

This was actually a huge beast with a large number of new APIs added to the system including new methods for Sprites, Box2D ParticleSystems and Pixel objects (which can now largely replace Bitmaps in some cases). We also added some addition Matrix and Viewport transformations and Gideros now has the ability to execute arbitrary Javascript code (JS.eval) and to pop up a soft keyboard on touch devices which support it ( application:setKeyboardVisibility(visible))

Here are more details of 2016.10 improvements.

Gideros 2016.12

This release (and it’s bugfix release 2016.12.1) was mainly concerned with plugins and Gideros’s new automatic plugin system (see previous blogpost for more on this). Whereas it was previously necessary to manually copy files from Gideros’s innards to get plugins working, the new plugin system means Gideros will copy the files automatically, you just need to select which plugins you want. Instead of hardwiring code into Gideros to do this, we instead have an embedded language so that you can add your own plugin export logic without recompiling Gideros. The new release allows some of this code to be written in Lua which is much more readable than XML (previously the only option).

As well as making plugins more useable and powerful than ever, this update improves various specific plugins including the Camera, Gaming, Admob, Applovin, Game Circle, IAB, Flurry and Controller plugins! That’s a huge list and makes Gideros much more powerful and up to date when it come to monetisation of apps in particular.

Here are more details of 2016.12 improvements

Gideros 2017.2

This release includes some technical issues like the ability to show a stack trace when the Android player crashes. It might seem boring but its important as it means users can send in detailed reports rather than just saying “it crahsed” and leaving us to guess what went wrong. Some aspects of Gideros export were improved as well giving making it smoother and simpler to use.

But the main story of this update was behind the scenes. Our genius programmer Nicolas Bouquet has completely rewritten the Gideros build system replacing some rather aging shell scripts with power makefiles. This should mean anyone can build Gideros easily though you will still need two computers (a Mac and a Windows 10 PC). One external sign of the new build is that the Mac export is now distributed in a PKG file rather than the older DMG format. The PKG file makes it easier to install Gideros in a modern way, with prompts to guide the user through the process.

Here are more details of 2016.2 improvements

Gideros 2017.3

This is a big release and has been described as “the best Gideros ever!”. In releasing this version we’ve also implemented a new testing system with more beta testers so it should be rock solid.

One major improvement to UWP (formerly WinRT) is that there is no explict reference to a Visual Studio SQLite extension. Previously users had to install an extension from VS “app store” before they could build Windows/Phone apps. The problem was Microsoft keeps updating the extension so when people downloaded the latest Visual Studio release it was always out of sync with the Gideros auto-generated project leading to manual tinkering. Now the bottom line is everything Just Works and you don’t need to download anything from Microsoft.

We’ve also had fun improving the Lua language (well just a little bit). Additional operators have been added to find the min, max of two numbers or to convert from degrees to radians or vice versa. Don’t worry! You can still use the standard library functions if you prefer but the new operators are fast and easy.

Finally, as well as LOTS of plugin improvements, HTML now comes with the Facebook and Ads plugins as standard so you can monetise your HTML5 apps easily. This is a big step: the first official plugins for HTML5 and very useful ones at that!

And, as an extra bonus, Gideros now supports a brand new advertising platform: kiip. Kiip is a new and innovative reward/ads system which is supported on iOS and Android.

More details of Gideros 2016.3 improvements

We are proud to announce the release of the latest version of Gideros, Gideros 2016.8.2! (Note, in this blog post we accumulate changes in 2016.8.1 and 2016.8.2, the latter being mainly a bugfix release.)

Download Gideros 2016.8.2! A labour-saving feature of the new release is an automatic plugin export mechanism. As many of you will know, adding plugins to exported Gideros apps (eg to incorporate ads, analytics, game controllers etc) currently involves delving in to the "All Plugins" folder of your Gideros installation and manually copying files into the exported project. This is tedious and accident prone and means reading through complex docs like these. The new mechanism means Gideros can do this for you, just click on the "Select Plugins" button in the Export dialog and select the plugins you want.

The automatic plugins also make Direct APK export more useful as it was previously restricted to "vanilla" Android apps without plugins. Now you just select all the plugins you want using "Select Plugins" and everything is baked into the APK Gideros auto-generates! No need for Eclipse or Android Studio!

Another great new feature is macros. Currently Lua has no constants, you just have to define variables like

pi=3.14159

Now you can define symbolic constants like this

pi @ 3.14159

and then simply use "pi" in the code as normal. When the Lua code is byte compiled, the constants are replaced with their literal values which saves CPU time. You can also do more advanced stuff like this.

pi @ |math.atan(1.0)*4|

Note the delimiters. And even,

-- macro definition time_ @ |local _time_ = os.timer()| _time @ |print("TIME:", os.timer() - _time_)| -- macro usage local x = 0 time_ for i = 1, 1e8 do x = x + i end _time

We've also added bitwise operators to Lua. (basically like C or Java). And our Lua now supports binary and octal number constants as Lua 5.3 does:

0b1101011010 0o7215678546

Here's the full list of additions and bugfixes (comparing 2016.6 with 2016.8.2):

Export features

Android Studio upgraded Gradle version

Gideros Studio non blocking export dialog with progress

Added lots of plugin installer scripts for Android (Android Studio, Eclipse, APK exports)

Allow providing default app and tv icons that are replaced on export for all supported platforms

Allow providing default horizontal and vertical splash images that are replaced on export for all supported platforms

Add additional win32 plugins on export to nearly match those available for Windows Desktop export (bitop, clipper, controller, json, lfs, lpeg, SQLite, luasocket, microphone, struct)

Gideros Features

Upgrade to latest OpenAL sound library for better sound latency

Shaders code can be supplied in-line from Lua

Textures can be created from raw pixel data

Global frame counter in Core.frameStatistics

Core.frameStatistics now returns table method to get shader language

TextField parameter for alignment: sample

RenderTarget can be saved to file

Tab switching by ctrl+tab (or cmd+tab) in gideros studio IDE.

Android returns device type (tv, appliance, car or mobile) on getDeviceInfo

Negative indexes support (-1, -2, ...) for Sprite:getChildAt(index), SpriteBinder:removeChildAt(index) and Sprite:swapChildrenAt(index1, index2) to get sprites from top

Lua features

Built-in macro support

Bitwise operators with new metamethods

int64 library

Binary and octal number constants

print() is sent to logcat

Fixes

Player connectivity

Correct requesting Open GL on desktop (due to upgrade to Qt 5.6: caused Gideros Player to crash on startup for some users)

lua and luac binaries compilation with mingw

Particles alpha

Particles are now visible after removed

Android player check file for null pointer when loading existing projects

Timer's behavior to run as set

Path2d texture positioning

Plugins

[Controller] fixed Moga lib for Android 21

[Gaming Google Play] show all leaderboards support

[Gaming Google Play] step by step achievements handling on GMS

[Gaming Google Play] improved API for achievements

I am delighted to announce the latest version of Gideros, Gideros 2016.6. This release has following new features and improvements:

New features

Introduce a threading system allowing to launch tasks in background

New Pixel sprite, a simple and fast rectangular coloured sprite 

New Particles sprite (alpha), which allows to draw several identical dots or bitmaps with varying colour and orientation

Releases now include offline docs

New examples

Lua 5.1 'universal' bytecode

UTF8 string library 

Improvements

Matrix object promoted to full 4x4 (3D) matrix

Matrix has sprite transform functions as well as direct scale/rotate/translate/multiply

Pixels can be retrieved from a render target through RenderTarget:getPixels()

Win32 target general improvements (fixed autorotation issue and UrlLoader now supported)

Shaders constants can now be set on a sprite by sprite basis

Viewport can now be used to render 3D scenes with different perspectives

Switched to QT 5.6 (fix multi monitor issues with gideros studio)

Updated luasockets to 3.0rc1 (for IPv6 access)

Fixes

Allow to remove a shader from a Sprite through Sprite:setShader(nil)

Fixed concurrency issue in UrlLoader on Android, causing random crashes

Fixed Render target clear/clipping

Android fixed orientation issue on screen suspend

Fixed export complete dialog appears only after export is finished

Logical scale now applies to Z axis too

HTML5 fix mouse buttons reporting

Fixed blur shader example to be GL ES compliant

Please download the new version here: 

Download Gideros 2016.6

We are proud to announce the latest version of Gideros with a huge milestone crossed, namely the introduction of HTML5 for all users. This comes about due to the amazing efforts of Gideros developer Nicolas Bouquet and also the generosity of our users during the recent Kickstarter campaign. And what an amazing export it is! Gideros games can run at full 60 fps, full screen in a browser! In fact you'll be hard pushed to tell the difference between the HTML5 browser app and a native app! I've tried a few cross platform tools and I can tell you the Gideros HTML5 export is the world leader in speed and fluidity.

And the best thing is, you don't need to change your Gideros code at all. Just export your code using the new HTML5 tab, double click on gideros.html and your app will run on your browser (note, it should be a recent version of Firefox, Chrome or Microsoft's Edge browser, not compatible with older Internet Explorers).

One of our leading developers, @totebo, has already exported his bestselling game, No Brakes in HTML5 and uploaded to MiniClip, we hope to see many more Gideros games on gaming websites as well!

No Brakes, a Gideros HTML5 game hosted on MiniClip

Here are some other awesome new features of Gideros 2016.4:

New keyboard event: EVENT.KEY_CHAR is now triggered on some platforms (QT, HTML5, WinRT) to allow grabbing textual representation of text typed on a physical keyboard.

Completely rethought the export system: introduce direct APK export (for Android) and app icon generation from a single visual (on some exports, work in progress)

Viewport object (inherits from Sprite): displaying same sprite hierarchy in multiple places, eg for split-screen games.

Cryptography: MD5 hash and AES128 encryption primitives

Lightweight Win32 Windows desktop export now promoted to beta. Now exports two executables one with a debugging console and one without. Largely feature complete but still lacks UrlLoader.

Additions:

Path2D texture support

gdrdaemon: Handle player discovery

Fixes:

Path2D bounds computation

Gideros Studio: Handle player loss (as opposed to discovery)

LiquidFun issues

Windows Store apps: fixed scaling issue on low resolution Windows 10 devices

Another major change in Gideros is that we are now accepting (and greatly encouraging!) donations from you, our generous community. You will see a donate screen when you download the new version. Of course, Gideros remains free and open source with no restrictions whatever and you can click through to get the download immediately. But we sure would welcome some funding if you have so money spare.

To keep Gideros compatible with new devices we constantly need new equipment. New Android, iOS and Windows Phone devices are coming out every month so we always need new testing devices. But these days we are also getting into consoles: we recently added support for Apple TV, and Microsoft announced that everyone can now develop games for Xbox One using the UWP framework (formerly WinRT). So it would be great to get an Xbox One and start testing. All this equipment needs money, and there are also website hosting fees etc, so please give us a contribution when you can.

From a personal point of view, I have now reduced my day job (as a physicist) to part time and am working 40% time on Gideros. I figured life is too short not to do what you love and Gideros is my number one passion. So your donations will help pay my salary so I can continue doing what I love best. If just 10% of people who download Gideros can donate £10 for each new release, we can easily achieve a modest salary for a part time worker. In future we'd love to go further, get more people working on Gideros and build up a team. But for now we are aiming at 40% part time salary at UK minimum wage for one worker. I'm sure this is possible while keeping Gideros open source and free.

The new donate screen when you download Gideros. You can use the sliders to "put your money where your mouth is" and encourage us to develop in particular directions.

Finally, your donations will allow us to promote Gideros through community events, meetups, webinars and conferences. I went to Apps World back in November 2015 and it was a great way to introduce more people to Gideros. But these conferences generally have fees and there are travel and printing costs, so it all costs money.

Dear All,

I am very pleased to announce that I have been hired to maintain and develop Gideros on a part time basis. I will be working 2 days a week alongside my existing (science) job, which I am reducing from full to part time. I will be primarily responsible for building and releasing new versions of Gideros, updating the documentation and promoting Gideros to a wider audience. Of course the other Gideros maintainers will continue to play a leading role in development and we greatly welcome your pull requests and other feedback such as bug reports and comments on the Gideros forum.

As some of you will know, since Gideros went open source in mid 2014, we maintainers have been building new releases mostly in our spare time. But it has got to the point when a few evenings a week is just not sufficient time to build and test such a complex system. Gideros runs on 8 operating systems and needs to be tested on each before release. It also needs to be compiled on at least two different computers (Mac and PC) and, soon, on Linux as well. The binaries then need to be reconciled into one place, packaged and signed. So it all takes a lot of time and effort and we all have other jobs, family etc which are demanding.

It therefore seemed the best solution was for one of us to work on Gideros on a formal basis as a "job" in its own right and that is what I will be doing. I have been fascinated by Gideros since I first discovered it in 2012 and leapt at the chance to get involved when it became open source in 2014. As many of you will know I organised the first Gideros Kickstarter and successfully added support for Windows Store and Windows Phone output targets. I also wrote the bare-bones win32 export and ported Gideros to Raspberry Pi and Linux. Maintaining Gideros is a dream job for me, it's a fascinating technical challenge and also something that is really worth while, directly benefiting developers and providing a valuable service.

But given Gideros is free and open source, you may be wondering how I will get paid? Firstly, let me reassure you that Gideros is and will always remain free and open source so you will never have to pay a fee to use it and you can continue to publish with no restrictions whatever. However, in future releases, we will start asking for voluntary donations when you download a new version. The idea is similar to Ubuntu: when you download Gideros, you will go first to a donation screen asking you to donate whatever sum you think appropriate. You can dismiss this screen and simply download but we hope people who find Gideros useful will donate what they can afford. It needn't be much money. If 10% of those who download Gideros can donate £10 per release that should be enough to pay a salary at the UK minimum wage level. Of course, I'd like to see more money than that! But please give what you can afford and we'll see how it goes. If more money flows in, we can use that to promote Gideros by, for example, attending conferences/exhibitions and writing articles for websites.

You should think of donating to Gideros as like giving a tip at a restaurant. At Gideros all the food is free! (the code is open source) but it still takes time and effort to cook and serve the food (ie compile/package/sign the code). The chef must also taste the food and, if he put salt instead of sugar in, he must throw it away and start again. This describes our testing process which often results in candidate releases being discarded and is time consuming as mentioned above. So if you enjoyed your "meal" please consider giving us a tip to recognise the effort we put in. Please consider donating for each release if it was useful to you -- and if you can afford it -- as each release takes time and effort.

(if you compile Gideros from source you don't need to tip -- you cooked the meal yourself!)

Now is a very exciting time for Gideros development. The recent Kickstarter to add HTML5 support to Gideros is nearly complete and very soon we will add this export to the official Gideros release. (previoulsy it was reserved for those who donated to the Kickstarter). Nicolas (@hgy29) has done a wonderful job with HTML5, with the result that Gideros games can run full screen at 60fps in a browser. It really is amazing how he has achieved practically native speed, something I don't think any other game engine can match in a browser.

Here are some more features coming up:

Direct export of Android APK files (no Eclipse needed)

Automatic plugin export. No need to copy files manually.

Complete the "bare bones" win32 export

Support ads in UWP (formerly WinRT) for Windows Store/Phone

Binary Gideros package for Linux and Raspberry Pi

Support OpenSL ES for better sound performance on Android

On the non-code side, one of my tasks will be to improve the documentation. The actual API specification is good but I will add some corrections and improvements where needed. What's really missing is regular new tutorials in the form of blog posts. I think this is especially important for the new graphics features like 3D and shaders. These have been there for a while but the documentation is hidden away and I think more explanation is needed to get people started. Another thing I will add is video tutorials. These are the best way to find out quickly about a new SDK so it's really important that Gideros has a comprehensive set of video tutorials to draw in more users.

I also hope to revitalise the Gideros wiki, which needs a lot of tidying up, and complete the "Ultimate Guide to Gideros" within the wiki. Some of you may remember the "Gideros Reference Guide" I wrote as part of the Kickstarter. Well, I would like to produce a second edition of that book and publish it.

On publicity, I intend to go to conferences. I already have the Gideros poster and flyers from Apps World last year. If enough money comes in from donations, I'd also like to recruit other people as "Gideros Ambassadors" to spread the word further. We can't pay you for your time, but we could, in principle, cover expenses like printing costs and travel. I can provide the PDFs for my Gideros poster and flyers to use. This is very much dependent on the money that comes in of course, but if we have a surplus I think this would be really worth while.

I also intend to write press releases for each Gideros release and also try to get the attention of the big websites and national newspapers.

Well, that's quite a lot of work for two days a week! But at least I will now have those two days, not zero days! The reason I'm doing this is because I really want to do it, and because it needs to be done. If you can make it financially worth my while that would be awesome too! If all goes well, perhaps I will be able to increase my hours or even consider recruiting more programmers if the money really ramps up. That depends on the donations and how many more users we can attract over the coming months.

There will be a transition period where I get up to speed with the aspects of Gideros I'm not so familar with like OS X and iOS. I will also need to buy a new Mac. Probably the first release I will be able to build myself will be end of March.

Thanks very much for reading!

It's amazing that Christmas is approaching already. As you get older the time between Christmases seems to shrink alarmingly and it feels like about five minutes since last Christmas when we were deep in the middle of our Kickstarter campaign to add WinRT and desktop support for Gideros. At that time we added an additional stretch goal: to port Gideros to the Raspberry Pi. I bought my son a Raspberry Pi for a Christmas present with the secret intention of "borrowing" it to fiddle with Gideros. Well to quote from Wham! it was a case of "Last Chrismas, I gave you a Pi and the very next day, I took it away" and my son has had barely a go this year as I've taken the Pi to my office where it sits attached to a monitor and an ethernet cable. At home we had it connected to the TV but that is not really practical for serious programming, especially with Gideros where you need constant access to internet tools like git and apt-get.

It's important to remember what our goals were in porting Gideros to the Pi. The Pi is an educational computer designed to teach children to code, it is not a games machine. So we wanted the Pi to be a development environment allowing children to code games and apps in Lua and export them to all the supported operating systems. While it might be nice for users to, say, develop code on a PC and export as a stand alone game on the Pi (alongside Android etc) this is a secondary goal. The Pi should be thought of as a development machine like PC or Mac, not a target "device" like an iPad or Android phone.

For a good chunk of the year, I've been trying to port Gideros to the Pi which has proved surprisingly difficult, due to two problems. Firstly Gideros is built with a compiler system called Qt and in particular Qt5. The operating system that originally came with my (I mean "our") Pi (pre-installed using the NOOBS system) was Raspbian Wheezy which for some reason only has access to Qt4. That is, it was only possible to install Qt4 directly from binaries via apt-get. I did attempt to compile Qt5.5 from sources but, after a 3 day compilation process (!), this did not entirely work. I did get a working Qt5 compiler, but there were a few anomalies: resulting executables had all fonts missing and did not run in a window but in a large "panel" which overlapped the entire X-Windows desktop. I now realise that the latter "bug" was actually a useful feature for reasons that will become clear in a moment. I also flirted with the option of rolling back Gideros to Qt4 (which it has previously used) but that turned out to be impractical. Yet another option of rewriting Gideros completely so it does not use Qt (I'm not a fan of Qt personally) proved even less practical...

Scouring the Raspberry Pi forums, I eventually discovered that a pre-compiled version of Qt5 was available after all, but only for a new, and then-unreleased version of Raspbian called Jessie. So I binned my hand-built Qt5, upgraded to Jessie and installed the pre-compiled Qt5. It all worked and I at last had a working compiler. So having spent several weeks "compiling the compiler" I was finally able to get on and actually compile Gideros. It was necessary to alter some source code and build scripts but overall the task was fairly straightforward and I soon had a fully working version of Gideros on the Pi, including Gideros Studio, Gideros Player and the ancilliary Texture Packer and Font Creator programs.

But then I noticed that Gideros Player was running at 1 fps (!) and this brings me to the second problem I mentioned: It turns out that, on the Raspberry Pi, X-Windows programs cannot use hardware accelarated OpenGL, but must render in software. This explains the abysmal performance. Strange as it may seem, at time of writing, the only OpenGL programs that can run smoothly on the Pi are non-X programs that run full screen. It's a bit like the "Christmas past" days of Windows 3.1 when it was necessary to "exit to DOS", in order to play games at a reasonable speed. No doubt this problem will eventually be fixed but for now, OpenGL and X-Windows are effectively incompatible on the Raspberry Pi.

When I figured this out, I kicked myself for getting rid of my hand-built Qt5 as it was indeed creating non-X apps which ran at 60 fps. The pre-built Qt5 I installed only creates X-Windows apps and apparently cannot create no-X apps short of recompiling it (recompiling Qt5 that is). This may yet be the best solution to the problem, but over the past few weeks I've been trying a different approach: to create a no-Qt, no-X player for the Pi. This is a work in progress but you can follow my efforts here:

https://github.com/gideros/gideros/tree/master/pi_example

So where does this all leave us? All components of Gideros now run on Pi but the Gideros Player, although functional is effectively too slow to be useful. However, Gideros has always supported on-device testing, so you can, for example, run Gideros Studio on a Pi and test on an Android device sitting next to it. The Android player will run at full speed of course. This is not a bad way to develop, but it means you cannot develop exclusively on the Raspberry Pi as yet. I will partly resolve the problem when I get the no-Qt, no-X player working, but the best solution will be when the Pi foundation fixes the X-Windows/OpenGL problem.

Please follow these instructions to build Gideros from souce on your Raspberry Pi:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6d6ccgwjy165hhk/buildGideros%20pi.txt?dl=0

We do not yet have a pre-built Pi version. In future it would be great to upload a binary to an official repo so you can install with apt-get but we need someone more knowledgeble about Linux to help with this (any offers gratefully accepted!). But for now, you will just have to build Gideros from source on your Pi, according to the above instructions. After all, the Pi is an educational computer and building stuff is one part of being a programmer so you can look at the build as a Christmas bonus! If you have any trouble with the instructions please let me know.

So overall the difficulty of compiling on the Pi has been due to the issue of "compiling the compiler", namely Qt5. If you consider Gideros itself to be a type of "compiler" then really I've been "compiling the comiler's compiler!", a mind-boggling process with as many layers as a Christmas pudding! In hindsight it might have been better to write Gideros entirely in vanilla C++/OpenGL without Qt as that would have made it easier to port. The lesson here is "keep it simple" especially if you have a cross platform system that should compile everywhere and you want to target minimal spec systems.

The Raspberry Pi is an amazing little computer. It punches well above its weight and can act as a genuine a desktop replacement or a great way for kids to learn programming. But scratch the surface and you uncover a series of quirks and missing features that would have even an experienced programmer tearing his hair out for many Chrismases to come!

Twas ever thus. Many Christmases ago, the coolest thing was a Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, and those diminutive and cheap devices were also full of strange bugs and limitations. But many were opened on a 1980s Christmas morning and many children started learning to program on Boxing Day lying on the floor next to the Christmas tree and staring up at the TV. I was one of them.

Happy Christmas everybody!

It’s been an exciting month as the HTML5 Kickstarter has been going on, but all things must come to an end and, as I write, we are within 24 hours of the deadline. It’s going quite well (85% at the moment) but the money is still short of the 5000 euro target. As many will know, Kickstarter is an “all or nothing” crowd funding system so we desparately need extra money to push us over the finish line.

If HTML5 in Gideros sounds good to you, please fund the Kickstarter! You needn’t put in a huge amount, even 10 euros would make a difference at this stage.

While the Kickstarter has been running, its creator Nicolas Bouquet has been working hard on the HTML5 engine and 3 Gideros games have now been exported to HTML5, one of which has already been uploaded to Miniclip! Click here to play these games directly in your browser:

Nebula Retro by John Blackburn

No Brakes, by totebo games

Save the Martians, courtesy of SinisterSoft Ltd

Just think! your games could be on Miniclip too (or Newgrounds etc) with single-click export from Gideros Studio: no additional programming needed! Nicolas has also promised to add Facebook and Google integration as well which will be a significant benefit for developers and possibly a useful income stream.

If the Kickstarter isn’t funded, Nicolas might consider selling the HTML5 export package as a separate plugin. In that case the HTML5 code would remain proprietary and would be controlled by a license server, perhaps with per-year or per-game fees. But it would be so much nicer to make it open source and available free to all with no restrictions like the rest of Gideros! If you think about it, 5000 euros is very cheap for so much work and when you consider the benefits it will give to Gideros, it’s a real bargain!

So last chance to fund it and make HTML5 in Gideros a reality!

Nebula Retro (a Gideros game) running on the Firefox browser

It’s been an exciting time for Gideros since it went open source in mid 2014. First, in December 2014 we had a Kickstarter campaign to add Windows Phone and Windows/Mac desktop support to Gideros. That campaign was successfully funded and work got underway. By June 2015 (Version 2015.06.30) the Windows Phone and desktop targets were officially added to Gideros and the Kickstarter is complete. So Gideros can now export to six targets:

iOS

Android

Windows Phone

Windows Desktop

Windows Metro (Windows 8.1, Windows 10 Store)

Mac OS X Desktop

But we are not going to stop there! Today, a brand new Kickstarter campaign has started which many of you may have noticed on the Gideros Forum: to add HTML5 export to Gideros!

Gideros Kickstarter campaign for HTML5

With this additional HTML5 target, you will be able to immediately export your Gideros apps into a HTML5 package and upload to any website (eg Newgrounds, Miniclip) or just host the app on your own server. It means anyone will be able to play your game on any device. All they need is a web browser!

This new Kickstarter project has different team members compared to the Windows Phone one last December, but nevertheless there is some overlap in skills and experience. The leader of the new project, Nicolas Bouquet, has helped extensively on the Gideros core graphics engine moving it from OpenGL 1 to OpenGL 2 (with shaders and 3D support) and also allowing support for DirectX. Porting to modern OpenGL 2 in this way has made it much easier to port to WebGL the graphics engine for HTML5. The other part of the puzzle, “trans-compiling” Gideros C++ source code across to Javascript is also well underway using the Emscripten “trans-compiler”

In fact, as you can see above, Nebula Retro already runs in a browser via HTML5 illustrating many of the core graphics features and events like touch and ENTER_FRAME are implemented already.

I have worked extensively with Nicolas over the last six months during the “Windows Phone/desktop” Kickstarter project and can vouch for his coding expertise and detailed knowledge of the Gideros source code (he wrote most of the current graphics engine himself!). I am certain he will be able to complete this project allowing export of any Gideros app to HTML5. I am amazed at how smoothly test examples already run in the browser. With his attention to detail, I’ve no doubt Nicolas will continue to optimize for browsers producing a very smooth and playable experience for end users. I hope everyone will give what they can to this worthwhile Kickstarter campaign!

Some of Gideros developers joined together and are launching a kickstarter campaign for funding Windows Phone 8 support and Desktop (including OSX) export for Gideros.

They already made significant progress and need a little of your help to fund the rest and make it happen.

As a backer you are also entitled to lots of interesting rewards, based on the backing level you provide.

If there will be enough funding, they are also considering providing stretch goals for other platforms for Gideros to support.

So go on and support them on their official Gideros kickstarter campaign

Gideros Kickstarter Capmaign

Hello folks

Gideros Source released

so as you know recently we finally released Gideros Source, which is now available on Github MIT licensed: https://github.com/gideros/gideros

We had to revert back to first working version, because for now we don't have time to finish the changes started.

Gideros Development version

Gideros Development version (the one that we are working on) is now available here: https://github.com/gideros/giderosdev

If you have any commits or pull requests, try to provide it to this Development version, as they will also need to be retested and revised.

Also if you have any issues to submit (even with current release), try to submit them to the Development version, because this is where the issues will be fixed and code modified.

When submitting an issue, try to provide as much information as possible, including stack trace (some crash reporting services can also provide links to share specific crash report, you may use them also)

Gideros 2.0

Gideros 1.0 moved too far and Gideros 2.0 is falling behind so badly, that we decided to make it obsolete (basically it is much easier to take Gideros 1.0 and modify it to work with OpenGL 2, than updating Gideros 2.0 to a state of Gideros 1.0)

So later, probably after Gideros Development version reaching stable release and when Atilim will have time, he will make a fork of current Gideros 1.0 version and port all the additions/changes Gideros 2.0 previously had, to make a current working Gideros 2.0 version, which will probably become new active development version.

Hope it all makes sense :)

Installing new Gideros

Currently we are looking into creating an easy to use build system so that anybody can create an installation package from codes easily.

If you have any suggestions or experience that you can share, we are all ears :)

For advanced users, build scripts are in gideros/scripts (https://github.com/gideros/gideros/tree/master/scripts)

P.S.

Hello folks,

There are lots of small example programs for Gideros but few full blown games available as source code. We can now present the complete source code of a full game that was released for both the Android and iOS markets.

One of our Guru Developers, John Blackburn, has released the source code of his game that many Gideros developers know: Nebula Retro.

Nebula Retro is a crazy platformer which will get you test both your reflexes and patience skills.

You can try out the game itself on: Apple appstore Google Play Amazon appstore

Or get the source and launch and tweak it on your Gideros Player

If you want, you can even create new levels, by using the in-game editor. The created levels will be in the Documents directory and you can copy the files to your project directory and add to your Gideros project.

The source is released under BSD license, so basically, you can do whatever you want with the source, modify it, create games from it, even commercial ones, but - you can’t claim it is your source - you must acknowledge the real author (for example mention him in credits) - optionally (but will be grateful) you can put reference to original work.

Of course you can’t release the game under the same name "Nebula Retro"

Note: While the code is opensource, graphics however, are not and are watermarked to prevent further usage.

Hello folks,

I assume many of you are interested of what the future holds for Gideros. So let me elaborate more on what we are working on.

First of all, we want to give all of our focus to Gideros 2.0. From now on, 2014.xx release line will only contain bugfixes/improvements and won’t contain any new features. We really want to move on to Desktop support and we are making it our priority with 2.0. After this release it will be the end of 2014.xx line and we will only work on Gideros 2.0 reworking all the quirks in design and making new and better Gideros for all of us. Once basic Desktop support is done, you will probably see it in Gideros Labs before official release.

Other thing that is in the works is a blazingly fast new Shape for drawing vector graphics. Which will also have curves and arcs implemented, and we are currently discussing most efficient ways of antialiasing. You can take a glimpse with our current implementation.

New sound engine is also in the works, which will need couple of changes in Gideros to make the best of it. It will have lower latency and will play more formats (as OGG file format for example). As also some cool features as 3D sound, panning and eventually effects.

We know moving plugins from one version to another is a pain, we really do. So the plugin installer is also something to look forward in the near future. Where each plugin can be described by xml config file, thus allowing you to manage better, which plugins should be installed for which projects.

These were the most important parts of the future plan. Of course there will lots of small additions and bug fixes through out, which will be described in release notes later on.

DoNothing

The very first plugin that does exactly as it describes: Nothing

Now you can easily doNothing(), setNothing(), countNothing(), callNothing() and even getNothing() (which always returns nil).

Testimonials: I just recently installed this plugin and was really shocked with the results. It really does nothing!

Coming to Gideros Labs and only on Gideros Mobile.

CrashThatApp!

Are your players getting too good at your games? Finding easier ways you did not intend to design? Beating highscores and getting so much points. That they don't even need to buy virtual currency anymore? Then don't wait anymore! Crash their games easily.

Including crash:luaCrash() and crash:nativeCrash() or crash:throwUnhandledException(). Cause ANRs using crash:infiniteLoop() or stack overflows using crash:infiniteRecursion().

And most importantly: Delete all their settings/scores/point and virtual currency using crash:deleteAll().

Don't get fooled by your players again. Crash their apps easily. Only with CrashThatApp! plugin.

Think you know Gideros well and have quite a skillset in making games?

Prove it and earn yourself premium status (Indie license), the more you know, the longer will be the license.

Starting from February 1st and up to February 28th.

Post tutorial about Gideros (linking back to Gideros website) on any website, submit it to us and earn yourself 3 month license for each tutorial.

To submit an entry between February 1st and February 28th, either PM @ar2rsawseen on forum or send straight to [email protected], including link to your tutorial and Gideros account username, which to upgrade/extend license to

License is cumulative, meaning you will earn 3 month of license for each tutorial you post. Just note that, for multiple tutorials to count, they need to be different tutorials, different topics and aspects of Gideros and they need to be posted on different websites.

So for example:

2 same topic tutorials on different website will count as 1 entry and will result in 3 month addition to license

2 different topic tutorials on the same website will count as 1 entry and will result in 3 month addition to license

2 different topic tutorials on 2 different websites will count as 2 entries and will result in 6 month addition to license

Note: website difference is determined by it's domain, so sub1.domain.com and sub2.domain.com are counted as the same websites.

Any Gideros member can participate (free and upgraded), all you need is a Gideros account.

And there is no limit to the entires

Don't have a website to post on? Check out these public options:

http://codeproject.com

http://gamasutra.com

http://gamedev.net

http://indiedb.com

http://tutsplus.com

http://thegamedevcast.com

Or popular gamedev forums:

http://forums.tigsource.com/

http://forums.indiegamer.com/

http://www.retroremakes.com/remakelounge/

http://www.mapcore.org/

http://forum.freegamedev.net/

Need an inspiration? Here is a simple example of tutorial on Gideros:

Learning Gideros in 10 Easy Steps

Or check this forum post for more tutorial topic ideas.

Now go and share your knowledge in Sharebruary and earn yourself a license! ;)

Hello folks, as you may have noticed, there was a Controller interface (http://docs.giderosmobile.com/interface/controller) posted some time ago, allowing you to add controller support for your games on Android (including OUYA) and even on Windows and Mac platforms. But IOS support was not yet added, because we did not have any controllers to test it on. But recently, from collaboration with Moga (http://www.mogaanywhere.com/) we got ourselves a test devices and will now work on filling the IOS controller gap, making the Controller interface quite full and usable :)

Hello folks,

Here is a special Christmas/New Year/What ever you might be celebrating in December promo. Buy Gideros License in December (until December 31st included) and get a free copy of "Gideros Mobile Game Development" e-book.

Don't miss this opportunity to not only upgrade your account, but also your skills.

So why should you upgrade your account to premium (Indie and Pro)?

Besides the apparent reason or removing the Gideros Mobile splash screen from your app, you also get the access to Gideros Labs, which contains many helpful libraries/plugins, as:

Ads Interface - allowing you to use virtually any Ad Network SDK under same interface

In app purchaseInterface - allowing you to use most popular In-App purchase libs under same interface

And even Developer preview versions which contain such awesome stuff as Shader support

Check out Gideros Labs for more information

Apart from the access to features, you will also get an option to protect your code and assets by encrypting them

And many other features coming in new year, as crash reports for your apps and LuaJIT support

What should you do after upgrading?

After upgrading, you can request your book by using our Contact Form, or opening a ticket in Support Center, or simply emailing to [email protected] with the subject "Give me Da book" (or any other reasonable and grammatically correct subject, from which we could understand what you want).

If you have already purchased a license in December, you still qualify and may request your copy of the book.

What the book is about?

As we have mentioned before, this book explains the basics of how to create a game with Gideros, while explaining lots of generic Gideros usage patterns and features, starting from installing Gideros on your system, up to using physics engine in your game.

And this book will be a great addition to both, who only starting to learn Gideros, up to developers who have already released the apps made with Gideros.