Hello there! I am also wondering if this is still alive. I find it very interesting!

Just wondering whether ShinyCocos project still alive or has been abandoned?

Oh no!

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/08/apples_iphone_4_sdk_license_bans_flash_java_mono_apps.html

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

nice! :-D
glad to hear you could download it.

Yes, ruby is awesome. I just love it... I've been playing a lot with python in the last few months, specially for GAE, but I must say: I still love ruby and prefer it over python.

I'm even teaching ruby to my fiancee (she's an English teacher)

@rolando git clone git://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos.git worked. Thanks for your help and thanks for developing shinycocos. Now I have a real reason to learn ruby. Which won't be easy for me as I preferred to use Python in the past :-)

Cheers,
Joe

@Joe ok... it worked with the read-only git url:

git clone git://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos.git

:-D
The http read-only might be broken. I'll update the documentation

@Joe you're right... I just got the same error this morning. I'll let it know to the guy @github. If you want to download the code, you can use the link above

weird... I just tried and it worked just fine... Well, you can always get a snapshot from the github page:

http://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos/archives/master

hth,
rolando

@rolando Yes, I used clone as in your post above. Just tried again and the problem persits. Will try once more tomorrow. Thanks.

@Joe did you try git clone? if so, then try again. It might have been a problem in github

Just tried to download shinycocos and got the following:

error: Unable to get pack file http://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos.git/objects/pack/pack-ae06c01ef1b33d4d11287a71ea404cbe06ad9b1b.pack
transfer closed with 3329243 bytes remaining to read
error: Unable to find 0a34f6e6154114187fcd81d460abff970e24e535 under http://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos.git
Cannot obtain needed blob 0a34f6e6154114187fcd81d460abff970e24e535
while processing commit 6711b83074788e6aa847e173876c6ef15a887bd4.
fatal: Fetch failed.

Any ideas? TIA

@rolando: Thanks for letting me know! I'll let you know if I find any issues or have any more ideas ;-)

@bradparks: it's included in latest version :-)

installation is a million times easier also:

git clone git://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos.git
cd shinycocos
rake install_template

then just lunch Xcode and choose new ShinyCocos Application :-)

EDIT: updated url

hey! i've added it as an issue here:

http://github.com/funkaster/ShinyCocos/issues#issue/20

thanks again!

@bardparks that's a good idea! Maybe for development target we could include the documents directory... Could you add an issue on github[1] to remember me to implement that? :-)

[1]: http://github.com/funkaster/ShinyCocos/issues

hey... thanks for the info... I'd only like to use the Documents directory for development, not for appstore release... that way I can try out tons of stuff without actually having to compile the app.... thanks!

@matt exactly. You should not download code and execute it at runtime. That's why I don't advise running code from the Document's directory

I'm not sure if Apple would care or not... They let lots of games that are scripted in LUA onto the App Store, so I don't see how this would be that different, as long as you're not downloading the code at runtime.

@bradparks: You can, but I would strongly suggest you to not do it... if you want your game to be approved by Apple, that is :-)
In order to load/run a ruby script for the document's directory, you have just to do something like require filename.
However, it will fail, since the document's directory is not in the load path. You can change the load path in runtime, or when ShinyCocos sets it up at start, check http://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos/blob/master/Integration/ShinyCocos.m (in ShinyCocosSetup())

Hi all,

Now that I have some time, I picked again on ShinyCocos and I fixed some nasty bugs that caused random crashes. The latest release (which I hope to be able to release this week) even comes with an XCode template, so it's really easy to start creating ruby games for the iPhone :-)

My last tests are showing that this version is really, really stable (and fast!). You can check the code in my git repo:

http://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos

best!
rolando.-

@rolando:.... Did you ever try getting Ruby scripts to run from the users documents directory? If not, could you point me to where in the ShinyCocos source I'd have to make mods to make it happen? I'm not really familiar with Ruby, but would like to start getting familiar with ShinyCocos, as I think it'd be a great solution to scripting my app, and I feel like I'm at the point now where it'd really help out... thanks!

@valley: as I told you before, you can build a whole game (given that everything you need to write a game is supported by ShinyCocos && cocos2d-iphone) and put it on the appstore. You have to take a few precautions:

There's a weird bug that sometimes crashes your game. I think this is due to ruby VM colliding or being called when garbage collecting. I haven't been able to specifically locate it... (there are lots of messages I sent to the ruby-core list, but with not much response)

Apple won't like you to specifically advertise that your game was written in ruby and that your game is shipping a "custom" interpreter. We got around this by doing two things: "encrypting" our code (there's info about this in the project wiki) and not putting anywhere in the appstore info that we're using ruby.

About performance, I don't think there will be a big difference: all the hard stuff is written in C/Obj-C, ShinyCocos is just a thin layer... Although GC and callbacks do cost CPU time.

Finally, what I think will come out of this experiment is: ruby is a great scripting language, and really awesome tool to write games on, but we need to keep things fast as hell when writing iPhone games, so my next approach will be to use ruby to program the logic (just like ShinyCocos is doing right now), but with the help of llvm & friends compile that code to native arm/x86.

Benefits of that approach:

• rapid prototyping/developing (currently on ShinyCocos)
• avoid common memory handling mistakes (currently on ShinyCocos)
• code will run as fast as regular c/obj-c (not currently on ShinyCocos)
• apple can't say a thing, because you're not shipping a custom interpreter (not currently on ShinyCocos, but we can't ignore this if apple also ignores it)

However, for that I need time, and next week is the deadline for IGF mobile :-)... so no time to work on that until 2010

So you wouldn't suggest to start writing Ruby games with Shinycocos now ?
I'm a little bit confused about your 'experiment' statement.
Also i would be interested in performance comparison between same iPhone apps
written in Objective C and with Ruby (e.g. 1'000 loaded images floating around).
Have you already done something in this direction. Would be interesting what
will be possible and what not when planning to write iPhone apps with Ruby.

Regards
valley

I have to thank you, Rolando! Now it works fine and i'm playing around
with your Test project.
I'm looking forward to what's coming next with ShinyCocos or its successor.
It would be great having a community of Ruby developers for the iPhone.
Keep going on with that great work!

Best regards
valley

Ok, this is what I just did (I found 2 bugs I'll have to fix, but right now we're trying to have our game ready for IGF mobile, so all fixes will have to wait for a couple of weeks):

Download ShinyCocos:

git clone git://github.com/funkaster/shinycocos.git

Download cocos2d-iphone v0.8.2 into the new shinycocos directory

cd shinycocos
curl -LO http://cocos2d-iphone.googlecode.com/files/cocos2d-iphone-0.8.2.tar.gz
tar xzf cocos2d-iphone-0.8.2.tar.gz
# rename cocos2d-iphone folder to something expected by the shinycocos project
mv cocos2d-iphone-0.8.2 cocos2d-iphone

Open the ShinyCocos project and, here's a couple of changes you need to make:

• Set the target/sdk to Simulator (or device) OS 3.0
• Select the ShinyCocos target, and add this header search path: ./cocos2d-iphone/cocos2d/Support
• Comment the line 926 of SC_Action.m (John Beaven implemented support for this, but it's broken now)

Now you can build the ShinyCocos project :-)
So now, open the test project:

open TestShinyCocos/TestShinyCocos.xcodeproj

set the target/sdk to Simulator (or device) SDK 3.0, build and run!

Please keep in mind that ShinyCocos is an experiment, and although there is a actual game built using ShinyCocos on the App Store, I have much more ambitious plans on integrating ruby in the iphone-game development process... but more on that later.

hth

PS: @valley, thanks a lot for your feedback!

Ok, it still doesn't work (i've also tried the Zipped versions of ShinyCocos).
Here my settings i use for building:
- Leopard 10.5.8
- iPhone SDK 3.0 (Debug and Release)
- gcc 4.0 and 4.2

I don't think that i have special settings anywhere, that's why i don't understand
why i always end up with that much errors.
Did nobody else encounter problems with getting this project to run ?

Yes i did that too, also with 78 errors. When you try it again it still works ?

Oh, one thing: before buiding the test project, build the ShinyCocos project... did you try that?

Yes i've done everything you mentioned, but without luck.
I get a 100 errors when building ShinyCocos. Error messages are e.g.
- 'userData' undeclared in SC_CocosNode.m
- expected '=', ',', ';', 'asm' or '__attribute__' before '*' token in SC_common.h
- etc. etc.

I have now also tried with SDK 3.0 and gcc 4.0 or 4.2, it never works.
I hope you have an idea why not or it happens on your machine too.

Regards
valley

I'll have to check it... last time I tried, it worked just fine with SDK 3.0
You have to keep the build in the same place. Did you placed a copy of cocos2d (v0.8) in the same folder as ShinyCocos project? after that, you also need to set the build output to cocos2d project to ../build

let me know how that goes.