[REQUEST] AGS Editor - OS X Mountain Lion

[edmundito]

If anyone's looking for a workaround, running the editor (or games) through Parallels with Windows 7 works very well.

It would be cool to get the editor to run completely in Mono, though! That might be the first step to moving the project cross platform. There's seems to be a lot of problems that can be worked around and solvable in the meantime:

- Scintilla issue - To start, the alpha version of the editor could live without it and have the user pick an editor of their choice (Textmate, bbedit, Sublime, TextWrangler, macvim...)
- PInvoke - Is it solvable in the long term? Could you make an editor without it first? (yeah, maybe it would mess the debugging... but it could get you to at least an alpha editor.)
- OSX Engine - I've seen a major AGS game working on iPhone. I wonder how close we are to take the next step and make it OS X compatible as well.

[subspark]

Yeah, it'd be nice to develop on these quality machines.

[Crimson Wizard]

- PInvoke - Is it solvable in the long term? Could you make an editor without it first? (yeah, maybe it would mess the debugging... but it could get you to at least an alpha editor.)

IIRC the PInvoke needed because it uses C++ dll? I think the best is to rewrite everything to C#. The sources are open, so the problem is to find someone who will do that in a proper way.

- OSX Engine - I've seen a major AGS game working on iPhone. I wonder how close we are to take the next step and make it OS X compatible as well.

AFAIK, it is compatible with older OSX versions. Newer OSX versions cannot run Allegro 4 library. It is all explained here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=47264.0
I am working on updating the engine to use Allegro 5 library now. I am generally optimistic about this, although there are certain things that will be not easy to recreate (8-bit graphics support). For that reason I am planning to do make it as a parallel branch for the first time.

[Joseph DiPerla]

AFAIK, it is compatible with older OSX versions. Newer OSX versions cannot run Allegro 4 library. It is all explained here: http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=47264.0
I am working on updating the engine to use Allegro 5 library now. I am generally optimistic about this, although there are certain things that will be not easy to recreate (8-bit graphics support). For that reason I am planning to do make it as a parallel branch for the first time.

I think two versions of the Engine (One for Allegro 4 and one for 5) would be nice. I would just wonder if its something that will go on surviving. I mean, basically you would have to implement the same features into both repositories of AGS, right? What if a feature you implement can only be done with A5 and not A4? I fully support a whole conversion to A5 as it supports all the major OS platforms and I Am sure it can be patched to work again with the PSP. As for the 8-Bit thing, is it something that is necessary? Whats the concerns with it exactly? Just a few thoughts.

Main reason I was posting here was for porting the editor to other operating systems...

Has anyone taken a look at this: http://xamarin.com/

It doesn't solve the Linux issue of the editor (Except for Mono), but it allows you to port to MacOSX, IOS/Android Tablets and it can integrate with MSVC#, so, who knows, might be worth looking at. Atleast it can still use much of the same code already created. I still think the best thing to do is to seperate the compiler and the editor so that users can use either text editing software or make their own editors to create AGS games and then just make the compiler cross-platform. AGAST (Though not cross-platform) had it set up that way.

[Calin Leafshade]

xamarin is just a rebranded monodevelop.