the "gideros meets raspberry pi" topic

keszegh

I thought now that gideros on pi is a reality, we should have a topic on it.

keszegh

my first question is regarding that @john26 wrote that gideros player is so far slow, does this mean that the exported pi apps are also slow?

second question is about the apps we promised to provide for pi gratis. i also offered my app fragmenter pro, so what should i do about it? especially if i do not have a pi.

SinisterSoft

Hopefully soon there will be a dedicated low level player for the pi - like the new Win32 player. This should run more or less like an Android or iOS device. You just export to it then release the package files.

john26

thanks very much for starting this thread!

Well I haven't succeeded in exporting apps from the Pi yet. All I've done is get Gideros Studio and Gideros Player to work and checked they communicate so you can load a test app in Studio and play it. (texture packer and font creator also work fine)

The next step would be to export a stand alone Qt app. It's worth trying but I think it would be slow as well. It may be I am doing something wrong with the Qt player compile which could be fixed. I noticed it's using 100% of CPU even when not running an app!

The best thing would be to create a pi-specific player without QT but that is quite a big task. Probably it's worth investigating the Qt player first. It would be good to get feedback from Qt experts on this...

Another option might be to boot directly to Gideros or a Gideros game. There's no doubt X-windows slows the pi down significantly.

The other thing is packaging Gideros for pi and distributing to others. We have had some difficulty doing this (library dependencies are very complex in Linux so sending binaries to other people is problematic). For now the best thing is to compile from source directly on the pi. I've written instructions to do this here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6d6ccgwjy165hhk/buildGideros pi.txt?dl=0
(assuming you have Rasbian Wheezy installed)

So if people can test on their pi that would be most helpful. Obviously it's no good if it can only run on my RPI!

SinisterSoft

Booting directly into a minimal windows with a pi-specific player would be the best option.

It should be about as fast as a medium speed Android console - as I think Gideros only uses a single thread anyhow.

keszegh

i just got an ad for a pi bundle, maybe others are interested:
https://stacksocial.com/sales/the-complete-raspberry-pi-starter-kit

i don't think it's worth it for me, especially that i work only with gideros, but it made me realize how cheap a pi2 is, so maybe it's time to get one.

SinisterSoft

You can get them cheaper than that. You just need the Pi and an existing keyboard, micro SD and mouse will do. It plugs into your TV...

john26

If you want to program it you will probably want to connect it to a monitor. to do that you either need a monitor with HDMI input or a HDMI -> DVI adapter. Note: it is not advisable to use the VGA monitor port for connecting the pi.

keszegh

@john26, as i remember there was a stretch goal where e.g. it was promised that among others my app Fragmenter will be provided for rasp pi. i'm up to that, but i don't have a pi, so i can't compile it. contact me how we should proceed. apparently nobody missed the promised apps but still it would be fair to provide them to the people who deserve it. it could be a link on the kickstarter page i guess.

SinisterSoft

@keszegh It should (hopefully) soon be possible to create a pi executable of your code - from another platform - it all depends if @john26 has enough time to make it.

keszegh

and what about a linux appimage? that would also be nice, if it's not that big work.

SinisterSoft

No idea. I tried the pi (native) version and for me it works faster than the Pi (qt) version. From that I think he should be close to making something that packs to a set of files. It would be great to have that kickstarter finally have a line drawn under it - with all the games, etc that we said would be available once it was done.

SinisterSoft

Linux shouldn't be much of a difference from the QT version of the Pi version?

elves

I posted a link to this discussion from the "is there a step by step guide to building gideros" thread. It has a broken link to build instructions.

I'm adding comments in dropbox as I build. So far I've got the Qt based studio and player running on a new Pi3B with quite a few warnings.

I'm failing to build without Qt and it's suspicious that the linker is missing a reference to gridbaglayout which is one of the files I had to change to build.

I've spent far too long doing this today (over 4 hours) and have real spreadsheets to manipulate 8-(

Still, at least I can now develop gideros code on both a Pi and C9. If I can help, I will.