So, there is a video game creation program called Sphere. It's been around since 1997, and is therefore old. It was billed as an RPG game creation engine, but has since been used to make really any kind of game. It has a built-in tilemap engine and handles things like windowstyles (the borders of popup windows) fonts (as bitmaps) and spritesets (images with frames, delays, directions, and indices). It uses JS as the game scripting language - the first to do this for that purpose - and it's API is very easy to use to get started, and up and running.
Sphere-SFML is a re-implemnation of the Sphere game API using SFML as the base for video game presentation. I wanted to make sure it's old API is kept intact so games made all the way back in 2001 can still run. But I also wanted to add new modern features, such as shaders and particle systems (It has a particle system but it's very clunky).
Anyways, I'm doing this in C#. This is a departure since the original was written in C++ and was cross-platform. But with some help from Mono I think I can make it cross platform - people mainly used Sphere under Wine anyways, so at least I have that option as a fallback.
As far as development goes I'd say I'm close to 80% realization of the Sphere game engine and API. I'll post screenshots of actual working games soon. Sphere had an abstraction layer for audio and graphics, so it had both a software and hardware driver. But the hardware driver is pretty bad and under SFML I can get a 400% speedup from sphere games.
The source code:
https://github.com/Radnen/sphere-sfmltl;dr SFML is being used to resurrect a dinosaur - how cool is that!? Hell even it's JS engine is called "Jurassic".
