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Introduction
minisphere is a drop-in replacement and successor to the Sphere game engine, written from the ground up in C. It boasts a high level of compatibility with most games written for Sphere 1.x, with better performance and new functionality. The majority of games will run with no modifications. Like Sphere, minisphere uses JavaScript for game coding. The engine exposes a collection of low-level functions through a standardized JavaScript API, leaving higher-level game logic entirely up to scripts. This allows any type of game to be made with minisphere; of course, this naturally requires more expertise than making a game with, say, RPG Maker or even Game Maker, but the results are worth it.
minisphere is not just a game engine, but a complete toolchain for game development. Several command-line tools, collectively known as the minisphere GDK, are included to make game development easier. And best of all, it's cross-platform: It is officially support on both Windows and Linux, and has been known to successfully compile on various versions of OS X.
minisphere and accompanying command-line tools are licensed under the very liberal terms of a 3-clause BSD license. Practically speaking, this means the engine can be used for any purpose, even commercially, with no restriction other than maintain the original copyright notice.
minisphere comes with a flexible script-driven build system called Cell, which not only allows you to package Sphere games into easy-to-distribute SPKs, but can automatically generate assets from easier-to-modify sources. For example: Building tilesets from images, or minifying scripts at build time.
Cell's design borrows heavily from SCons, with a declarative approach to scripting. This may be confusing for those attempting to jump right in; it is highly recommend to read the manual page for Cell before trying to write a Cellscript for your game.
note: Cell is still in its infancy. The feature set will be fleshed out in future versions.
minisphere includes a powerful but easy-to-use command-line debugger, called SSJ. The debugger allows you to step through your game's code and inspect the internal state of the game--variables, call stack, objects, etc.--as it executes. And since minisphere uses JavaScript, the original source files aren't required to be present--SSJ can download source code directly from the minisphere instance being debugged.
A symbolic debugger such as SSJ is an invaluable tool for development and is a minisphere exclusive: No similar tool was ever available for Sphere 1.x.