.app to .exe?

Cutscene Entertainment

I know that there are a plethora of ways to convert .exe files to be playable on mac. Does anyone know how to do the reverse? Change a .app file into a .exe essentially?
It's kind of a big deal for game designers like ourselves to be able to publish to PC, because that's an extremely huge market for indie games- and since GS doesn't seem like it will be adding Windows publishing any time in the near future, this might be the only feasible way of reaching that audience.

Twayne2

May I ask what a .app file is?

AlchimiaStudios

@Cutscene Entertainment said:
I know that there are a plethora of ways to convert .exe files to be playable on mac. Does anyone know how to do the reverse? Change a .app file into a .exe essentially?
It's kind of a big deal for game designers like ourselves to be able to publish to PC, because that's an extremely huge market for indie games- and since GS doesn't seem like it will be adding Windows publishing any time in the near future, this might be the only feasible way of reaching that audience.

I don't think it's possible, unless you wrote a crazy VM to run the .app within. Even then, apple would probably have something to say about that,.

AlchimiaStudios

The most promising way to achieve this would be HTML5, and wrap it using something like Cordova to an .exe. There are some shortcomings of the HTML5 engine right now though, so it may lag or have bugs, or just not work period.

Twayne2

I have tried having a html5 file wrapped, and then have tried having it put on Steam. So far the file has been so far glitching. Trying an android approach now, but still hoping for the Steam stuff to pull through.

Cutscene Entertainment

Thank you everyone for your input. This is unfortunate news. Best of luck with your files, Twayne. And by the way, a .app file is a mac application. Like a .exe for mac c

Twayne2

Is it possible to do that with Gamesalad? The .app file?

jamie_c

@Twayne2 said:
Is it possible to do that with Gamesalad? The .app file?

Yes you are able to create a Macintosh playable .app file with Gamesalad.

shaneggpierce

I also have this same question because i wanna test this by converting exe.

Twayne2

Do you by chance have the gsproj file for your lightsaber file?

Lokitoes

@AlchimiaStudios said:
wrap it using something like Cordova to an .exe.

Sorry to bring up an old post, but I'm really hoping that one day GS implements a .exe output. In the mean time, AlchimiaStudios could you elaborate on how to use Cordova to make a .exe from something exported by GS?

jonmulcahy

3 years ago I took my gamesalad project, outputted an HTML5 version and converted that to an exe and sold it on steam.

https://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/89397/a-long-way-home-released-on-steam/p1

I put a whole bunch of steps I went through in that thread. I don't remember much about what I did, and the tools have probably changed, but it is possible.

Lokitoes

Thanks @jonmulcahy ! I've been looking into this but it seems almost impossible to make the work launch in full screen in a simple way - there is always a tabs bar at the top of the resulting .exe - did you find that was your experience?

jonmulcahy

@Lokitoes said:
Thanks @jonmulcahy ! I've been looking into this but it seems almost impossible to make the work launch in full screen in a simple way - there is always a tabs bar at the top of the resulting .exe - did you find that was your experience?

I don’t remember, but I think I managed to get it working in full screen. I even exported a Linux version at one point. It’s just been too long

adent42

We're working on some improvements to the HTML5 engine. A couple of considerations:

• The HTML5 engine is much stricter about function calls in expressions. If you're hacking in something in from lua or using the wrong parameters like 'round(self.numberAttribute, 0)' instead of 'roundTo(self.numberAttribute, 0)' or 'round(self.numberAttribute)', then it won't work.

• Font rendering. Text rendering is, uh, bad, on HTML5. We're currently reworking the renderer. We've got most of it corrected, we just got alignment issues to work out (i.e. larger vertical horizontal alignment issues. The ligature / cutoff character issues are mostly worked out.

• Performance. The HTML5 engine is gonna be less performant, so some physics simulation may be off. We've corrected a few major issues in this pending release which will result in some collision fixes. We've also reverted to our pure JS version of Box2D instead of the emscriptem version. The emscriptem version is a bit more performant in some ways, but it's kind of a bear in terms of memory management and would eventually cause worse performance. So we switched back since it's not gonna cause you laptop to jet-engine the fan and it's easier to debug.

PM me and I can get you the development version of the new HTML5 engine for testing if you want to try it.

I still hope to get windows working sooner than later, but we've got quite a few things to do first.