On 10/5/14 22:42, Ralph Boland wrote:
I was recently approached to develop a children's educational computer
game version of a real (wood etc.) game
(looks like a pretty good game).
I said I would only be interested if I could do the first
implementation in Smalltalk (Squeak or Pharo).
But if I develop this game in Smalltalk what am I dealing with in
terms of releasing this product
to a customer (over the Internet).
Plop was a squeak game sold. My kids played with it without me doing
anything.
1) I know I have to build a suitable executable but I have never done
this. I have only written Smalltalk code that I then
use. So how do I build such an image and how big is it (assume
code for game is small (say 3000 lines of code)).
I think that you can get easily under 10 mb removing the tools. And we
can help for that.
2) How do I get the virtual image on the customer's machine. Keep in
mind the customer is someone somewhere
on the Internet who probably knows little about how to install
Smalltalk or anything else. I am assuming here that
installing the game and installing the VM are two different
tasks. Is there a way to make this a single task?
You can have the one click which is doing a cross platform launcher.
Plop and sophie were deployed like that. Moose and Seaside during years too.
3) So far I am assuming the target machine is Linux/Windows/Mac on a
Desktop/Laptop.
But can Smalltalk be run on any of the IPad/Notebook/etc out there?
These machines represent a larger game market I believe.
Any is not a simple word. If you want to deploy on android or iOS I
imagine that you know that there are different
constraints.
4) Assuming I can arrange for my computer game (if I write it) to be
installed are there memory/cpu usage issues
that I need to worry about (the game itself will use a minimal of
memory/cpu except for graphics which also
is pretty reasonable). I am thinking here of IPads etc.
for iPad JochenRick deployed squeak and Pharo solutions. Now people are
working on a ARMJIT and we will have soon and ARMASM so it will go faster.
For Desktops/Laptops there should be no problem.
Download time and subsequent storage space is also a concern;
remember the device is probably used for
lots of other things so the amount of space allocated for games
may be small compared to the space on the
machine?
Do you know the average size of an application one the different devices?
Because any goodies on Mac is much much more than the complete Pharo
release with full sources (which can be removed)
5) Sorry for the redundancy if these questions have been asked before
(which I am sure they have).
Thanks for any feedback; I am sure others are interested in this
question too.
What you should consider is that as a community we are interested in
making you succeed now
it also depends on you :)
Ralph Boland
