Forums » Impact Engine » Any interest in weltmeister in atom-shell?

Heyo!

Before I head down this path all by myself, I wanted to gauge interest in having a standalone weltmeister running in atom-shell.

It at least sounds like a fantastic way to work. I can't think of any reason why the tools and weltmeister couldn't take advantage of this and break free from the shackles of php/apache/SimpleHttp/<insert however else you serve the tools>.

I hate to dump cold water, but why? What's the benefit of atom-shell over the browser? Is it a stepping stone to later tighter OS integrations around choosing files and stuff? That could be neat.

From what I understand, this would wrap Weltmeister into a stand-alone app that you could run just like any other app without the need for a browser. I've seen this done with some webpages. While it's really cool, I don't understand the advantages enough for the effort (unless it's easy), except that it would just work without the need PHP or setting up a localhost server like MAMP, LAMP or XAMP.

Sounds like an interesting idea for an experiment, but wouldn't it make more sense to develop it using a PHP based solution like PHP Desktop ?

Yes, tighter integration with the desktop is one goal but you can get a lot of mileage and functionality from the nodejs ecosystem all bundled into a single app (wouldn't necessarily require a nodejs install, just download this app). Open your project with the app, start in the editor, launch the game in a separate window if you like, or just have an auto reloading server (using browser sync or something similar).

You can take the idea much farther (and I intend to), but having a functional weltmeister is the first step even though it wouldn't be much more than you would get from any of the other existing node based impact workflows.

I have no plans to setup *AMP just for weltmeister. I have done this in the past and it worked fine but there is a very small amount of php realtive to the javascript in impact, and it's all easily ported to javascript or replaced by another readily available tool. Because of this, and the extensive prior art here bypassing the php utilized by impact entirely, I don't think PHP Desktop is a good choice either.
There isn't a ton of work to do to replace the php "api" with an atom-shell version of weltmeister. It would require modifications to weltmeister to make an atom ipc call instead of a jquery ajax call and at a quick glance this would only affect 4 spots in the code base. Even this might not be required if you just wanted to run a server behind the scenes.

I'm primarily asking here to gauge interest from others. I intend to start with this but if there was enough interest I figured it would be worth an attempt to collaborate a bit. Ultimately I'm shooting for "ImpactEd" or <insert name of tool referencing other famous tool>.

Those all sound like good ideas to me. And, actually, when I started thinking about windowing in native vs. windowing in the browser this seemed like a better idea.

Y'know those tool windows that are tiny and float off to the side like in image editing programs? It's kind of a pain to do that in browsers because window.open opens a window with a bunch of chrome on it in a different context so it's harder to access what's happening in them or update them with state from the main window. I wonder if the atom-shell provides better management for that... or, at least, since you're already bouncing a lot of state through what they call the "browser side" (the shell instead the client it's rendering) it'd just be natural?

Just spitballin'.

And, yeah, let's kick Tiled's ass. ( =

Well, that went quick enough. I can run weltmeister as an external tool in IntelliJ now. :)

Time to expand upon all of this. If I make any worthy progress I'll share in the private forum.

Whoa, you posted while I was still writing that last message and I didn't catch it.

Yeah, the atom-shell architecture makes the sorts of things you're suggesting totally possible and you get things like native file dialogs too (which I think probably renders a portion of what php is used for in weltmeister irrelevant).

How is this different from making a Node-Webkit version. I was able to port one of the many Node Server version into node Webkit really quickly. I was just doing this to learn node, and was pretty excited at how easy it was. Just wondering if there is another benefit that I'm missing.

It just so happens the atom-shell project covers this.

I didn't know the answers either before reading this.

@stillen I think Node-Webkit is also pretty great, but I personally found the architecture of atom-shell more appealing. In addition to that, it's eager adoption of iojs over node (compared to atom-shells more cautious "we'll go where the community at large goes") made it feel like a safer bet over all.
And, out of those items on the atom-shell list, the easy build is sooo nice. Rebranding, packing, distributing are much more feasible with atom-shell.

@photex: Just swung back around to say, "Holy shit!" and tell you thanks. I had no idea that starting an atom-shell app was that easy! So, yeah, thanks again!