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General fluff => General ENIGMA => Topic started by: time-killer-games on June 22, 2013, 03:18:27 AM

Title: LGM IDE for android?
Post by: time-killer-games on June 22, 2013, 03:18:27 AM
I don't know anything about android development outside of GMStudio, but how easy would it be to make LateralGM run on my nook android tablet? I might start looking into this depending on how do.able it might be. I know android apps can have java elements implemented. Is there any super easy way to convert LGM into an android apk? This I believe could help a lot of users make games on the go, sure you won't be able to test run or debug, but I'd find that if LGM was android compatible it could really give LGM/Enigma more popularity. Not too many game engines out there have a mobile compatible IDE. The only game engine I'm aware of that can do this currently is Quest, an extremely limited text adventure creator.

Just throwing this idea out there :-)
~Samuel
Title: Re: LGM IDE for android?
Post by: Josh @ Dreamland on June 22, 2013, 03:37:23 AM
Considering Android is primarily Java, it really should not be difficult. But I don't know how to get Swing working on it. While I don't believe Android supports Swing at all, I believe the format it uses is similar enough that porting LGM should not be a huge problem. My main concern would be in maintainability; we don't want this process to involve a lot of duplicate code (preferably none at all) or prevent compile of LGM on a non-embedded system, but at the same time we want to be able to store the code together.

TGMG probably knows the most about this, but he's AWOL.
Title: Re: LGM IDE for android?
Post by: Goombert on June 22, 2013, 01:05:42 PM
TKG, you are now the second person to request this within 24 hours. Yes as Josh has stated it being an embedded system would make it an excellent host to the LateralGM IDE. Josh, we can always maintain a separate fork/branch/repository if user interest is that high.
Title: Re: LGM IDE for android?
Post by: IsmAvatar on June 24, 2013, 03:34:29 PM
The entire LateralGM front-end is based on Swing, meaning that you would have replace all of that.
Note, LateralGM does have MVC, so you'd only be replacing the Presentation-tier, but still, for an IDE, that's a significant portion of the project.
When LGM was still young (back when "mobile" meant flip-phone), I did flirt with the idea of a web-app version of LGM, but put the idea on the back-burner because it meant some research into how to handle the files - and getting LGM working at all was a main priority, which meant a lot of Swing work one way or the other.
Title: Re: LGM IDE for android?
Post by: time-killer-games on June 24, 2013, 09:22:25 PM
Thanks guys for information. Its a shame android doesn't support swing. :-/