Now that the Spring engine is finally coming to Mac, I'd like to submit here a pre-release of SpringLobby for Mac OS X, on which the SL devs and myself have been working on. Future releases will most probably be available elsewhere, but I wanted you guys to give it a try and give your first impressions.
Big thanks to the SL-dev team (especially Koshi and BrainDamage) for guiding me through the first steps into the code, and adding Mac-specific features with or without my input.
DISCLAIMER: Please note that this release should be considered "alpha" stage, and the SpringLobby dev-team should not be held responsible for any Mac OS-related bugs you may find (it may just be me giving them a hard time ). This release is almost entirely built automatically, a few minor tweaks are done manually, so a regular release workflow might be set up in the not-so-far future.
QUICK START GUIDE:
- Pre-requisite: Game content and settings are located in the ".spring" directory of your home folder, which is created the first time you run spring (*not* SpringLobby). If you start off fresh, make sure you create the "maps" and "mods" subfolders inside .spring to store your precious data. Note that you can reuse existing content, as this is platform-independent.
- Download, unzip and run this
If it's your first run, you'll get the traditional welcome message, followed by the preferences window. If not, you just land on the main window. - Either way, open the preferences panel (Edit > Preferences), and go the "Spring" tab. Focus on the third field, called "Spring App Bundle". Click on the "Browse" button and point to your Spring.app bundle (whichever version you wish to use). Finally click "Apply" and close the window. Note that in some cases you might need to re-open the preferences window and re-click on "Apply" (still figuring out why)
- Connect (Server > Connect...) and enjoy
- SYNCING: any Spring version starting from the testing releases can be used with SpringLobby and will sync across platforms. This will *not* be the case for the current version (0.82.7.1 as of writing).
- GUI: SL is backed by wxWidgets 2.9.x which is 64bits but in a beta stage on Mac. Therefore it may cause serious crashes from time to time (less with recent releases) and may also throw you some (many) warning boxes, which you may freely disregard.
- BOTS: the "Add bot" window is initialized with width "1", which makes it tricky to see and expand. But if you do see it (look for a vertical shaded line on your screen), a few clicking attempts on the bottom (right-hand) handle should restore to a decent size.
- DL: the torrent system is active, though I have had some trouble downloading maps/mods (curl errors). Manual dls into your "~/.spring/maps" and "~/.spring/mods" is recommended for now
daft
EDIT: the link has been updated with a more recent build made available by koshi in this very thread, which fixes several issues and is a bit more playable.