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Is the .gproj file necessary? — Gideros Forum

Is the .gproj file necessary?

rpallenrpallen Member
edited November 2017 in General questions
I’m reading Arturs Sosins’ book “Gideros Mobile Game Development”. He mentions that you don’t have to use the Gideros IDE and can use other IDEs as well. I assume you don’t even need an IDE, but just using a text editor (such as Notepad++) is sufficient.

I get the impression that the .gproj file is created automatically and then used by the Gideros IDE. I’ve got a couple of questions related to this.

1. Is the .gproj file necessary regardless of the IDE being used? i.e., if I’m using ZeroBrane or SublimeText, do I need a .gproj file?

2. Is the .gproj file necessary in the Gideros IDE? i.e., if I start a project in ZeroBrane or SublimeText it doesn’t create the .gproj file. If I then open this project in the Gideros IDE, what will happen? Will the project work without a .gproj file? Whether or not it works, will the Gideros IDE add a .gproj file to an existing project opened in Gideros that doesn’t already have one? (And for that matter, if someone accidently deletes the .gproj file they started in the Gideros IDE, will the IDE automatically create a new one?)

Comments

  • If you will open gproj file with a notepad, you can see that it has a plain xml format.
    It stores some important parameters like which file to be excluded from execution while building the project, package name etc..

    I know some of those properties can be set from lua itself directly, from the code like logical dimensions . But not sure that without gproj you can export your project correctly.

    As far as i know it is like a configuration file that is used by the IDE while building your project. (Exporting)
  • Gideros projects need a .gproj file. Gideros projects ARE the .gproj file. It's where all file references, dependencies on each other, input options, export options etc are detailed.

    I'm guessing you maybe come from an HTML background where the folder is the project and no project files are required?

    If you create a file structure and a few files in a text editor, then you still need a .gproj file for them to do anything. Just create "New Project" in Gideros Studio and point the dialogue to the correct location. Then right-click on the project name in the file tree and "Add Existing Files". You might want to add folders too, to keep things tidy.

    Remember that folders you add in Gideros Studio are not added in the file system, they are purely for Gideros. This is normal for IDEs that use project files, it means you can have a nice looking project file tree that contains files from all over your hard drive(s). But it does mean that if you want an equally tidy project directory, you should deal with that as well.

    Once you've set up a project, you can edit the .gproj file in a text editor to add files. Be careful though, you can break it. If you do, you can create another one and "Add Existing Files" again, but in the 21st century we should all be using version control so that will never happen, right? :)


  • Thanks, talis and snooks.

    Snooks, I'm not coming from an html background, but rather from löve (love2d) which is also lua based but doesn't have a project file. You just put a project's lua files in the project directory and any other resource files (images, fonts, audio) in the project directory or sub-directories of the project directory. Again, no project file for organizing the project's resources (at least not to my knowledge and I've never used one in the projects I've done.)
  • @rpallen I think if you really wanted to compare Gideros to any other framework then it would be AS (Action Script). I think that it is loosely based on that :)
  • @rpallen: Ah okay thanks, I'm not too familiar with love2d beyond having browsed some code and porting something to Gideros.

    Gideros does some clever performance-enhancing things under the hood too, like compiling files that don't have "Exclude from Execution" set to a single file for subsequent pre-processing with macros before compiling everything to universal bytecode. There's handling of native plugins too. So there's a necessary deviation from live interpreting files in a folder.

    Different animals, swings and roundabouts etc.

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  • @rpallen the Lua enhancements are documented here:
    http://docs.giderosmobile.com/reference/enhancement

    I think that work is also being done on a Love2D api compatibility 'plugin' that should allow many (all?) of the Love2D examples, etc to run within Gideros.
    Coder, video game industry veteran (since the '80s, ❤'s assembler), arrested - never convicted hacker (in the '90s), dad of five, he/him (if that even matters!).
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  • The advantage of the project file over just putting all your lua files in one place is that it 'virtually' puts them all in one place. To the lua program they are all there - but in reality the same lua (or graphic, etc) file can actually be used in loads of projects. So you only have to update a single source code file and they all update. I use this ability on a couple of my games I've skinned differently - eg slots games.

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