Which framework for mobile games? Mac tools?
Monkey Forums/Monkey Beginners/Which framework for mobile games? Mac tools?
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| I've found it a little difficult to navigate the forums and find up to date information, I would love peoples input on their favourite framework and why. My requirements are preferably all mac toolchain, anyone know of a mac font creator? Fontmachine doesn't seem to have a mac tool? As I was writing this post I noticed congo used fontangel, not knowing what that is I found Beakers post here http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=141&page=first Mac font tools for it are; http://71squared.com/glyphdesigner - $40, looks nice http://www.bmglyph.com/ - Uglier but $10 Hiero Bitmap Font Tool - Free - has some serious support issues, moved site 3 times, and still seems to have no dedicated site for it? best I could find https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Hiero Ideally I'd like to have; resource management for scaled assets (or better yet, svg rendering!) easy scaling (autofit/autoscale) handling taps/finger input nicely gui controls (buttons, lists, layout) debugging features So far there seems the likely candidates are (in order of last updated); diddy - Jan 18 - https://code.google.com/p/diddy/ congo - Jan 5 - https://code.google.com/p/congo-monkey/ fantomEngine - August 18th - http://www.fantomgl.com/ Horizon - a year ago - https://github.com/JochenHeizmann/Horizon-for-Monkey Ignition - ???$$$ - http://www.playniax.com/ mojo - standard Diddy seems popular, documentation looks abit lacking though? fantomEngine - seems most feature complete and documented Congo - feature list seems impressive but very new? Horizon seems like it's no longer supported? Ignition requires an investment and not really sure if it's worth it? mojo, well it looks like the others exist to do some things mojo doesn't do. |
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| Well, for the Bitmap font tool I recently found FontBuilder: https://github.com/fontello/font-builder I use this with a modified anglefont module and it works ok, just hasn't got the greatest interface but it's not that bad. fantomEngine and especially diddy have been around nearly forever so they sure are battle tested. They should include most of your features (except svg rendering). Generally you can take one of the above frameworks as a starting point. Then add all modules you need and wrap them up in your own functions/classes. ------------ PS: I uploaded a compiled version (it's open source, MIT license): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2892658/forum/FontBuilder.app.zip Export as sparrow format. |
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| For fonts look at Jugnle's FontMachine which has a monkey module and and IDE to build cool fonts with and Ziggy is quick with support. |
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| For fonts I use bmGlyp (10$), it has a good interface and works well with Monkey (through Angelfont). For a framework I think Congo looks promissing, it is well documented and has nice features, but haven't tried it yet. Diddy is stable and good but documentation is sparse. |
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| FantomEngine supports several font tools. plus a new update with more animation functionality is close to be released. |
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| I've been using bmGlyph for ages, happy with it. To be honest, I feel mojo/monkey should have better font support internally, but you could argue the same for asset handling etc etc :P Hiero was, sadly, completely broken when I last tried it. autofit is great, might as well use it! (or look at the code to see how it is doing things). Congo is my own framework, still very early days, and cant be compared to those others yet. The feature-set is simply the things I encounter in my own projects. But, it will get updates. Personally, when learning monkey I started by writing simple games using only mojo. That way you learn the core features, and can better identify what you need. There are others; Flixel has a monkey port, but I havent tried it. And, check out bono too. Resource management is indeed a bit awkward :/ I wrote my own for Congo but its still not quite as flexible as I want. It basically mimics cocos2d asset/res handling, ie a texture cache and scale factors for each sprite. I've not considered parsing/rendering svg directly but I can see the appeal of that for certain cases. |
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| On OSX I use Glyphdesigner for creating Bitmap fonts. Nothing beats that. |
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| For mouse/touch input I just have the following in my basic frame app. It's enough to make clicks, drags etc. easily accessible, whether the target uses mouse or touchscreen - though mouse is only useful on a touchscreen when it's being touched, in which case you can use it to track drag operations. You can check whether a drag was short and quick if you want to allow a tap here - tap there mode for moving objects (or an old-style Windows-type click). Obviously I'm using Point objects to store positions, and the non-local names are public fields of the app. It's nothing more than a very thin wrapper around the Mojo functions, but it lays the data out in a way I find it easy to work with. If you need something more elaborate, I seem to recall somebody wrote a module or code that reads at least some gestures. Nearly all my framework stuff is homemade. |
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| wow thanks for the feedback! great to see such a responsive community! |
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| For input, I use a modified version of NoOdle's gesture stuff. It supports inertia, drag, swipe... http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=3844 There is also http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=3947 which handles multitouch better. |
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| Thanks raph that helped me alot, |
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