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Distributing your applications

DOME is designed to be cross-platform, and so the same Wren code and assets should work across Windows, Mac and Linux. There are different approaches to sharing your application with others.

Please note, none of the methods described here will provide adequate protection from reverse engineering or asset extraction, but may be a temporary hurdle against the casual user. They are intended only as measures of convenience.

Basic Packaging

The simplest and easiest way to share something you’ve made is to place a DOME binary, your source code and assets into a single zip file. Do this once for each platform you wish to support, and share those zip files with your users. If you are providing your own DOME binary, rather than a pre-compiled one, you will need to have access to the shared SDL2 library.

Bundling with nest

For convenience, and to reduce the risk of a file going missing, you can create a .egg bundle, which packages all of your application code and resources into a single file. This can be done using the nest tool built into DOME.

To create a bundle, navigate to your application’s root directory, before running the following on the commandline:

> dome nest [files | directories]

This will bundle all the files and directories into a file named game.egg. DOME automatically plays any file named game.egg in the current working directory. It expects that bundles contain a main.wren file in the base directory of the bundle, as the entry point for execution.

Fused Mode

Depending on your needs, you might want to only distribute your application to your users as a single file. This is possible using DOME’s “fuse” mode. Once you have a .egg file as described in the previous section, you can embed it inside a DOME executable using the “fuse” tool. Run DOME from the commandline like this:

> dome fuse game.egg [destination file]

This creates a standalone executable which requires no other files to run. If you set a destination file, the resulting binary will be placed there. Otherwise, it’ll be placed in the current working directory, as a file named game (or game.exe on Windows). This will only produce a binary for the current platform. You’ll need to do this on each platform you want to distribute to.

Platform-specific Distribution Notes

This section discusses the needs of various platforms when distributing applications with DOME.

Windows

On Windows, DOME comes compiled with all its dependancies, so you just need to provide your application files.

Mac OS

On Mac OS platforms, you can create an application bundle by arranging your code and assets into the following directory/file layout:

<Game> is a placeholder and should be replaced by the name of your application. It must be named consistently in the bundle layout, as well as in the Info.plist file.

+-- <Game>.app
    +-- Contents
        +-- Info.plist
        +-- MacOS
            +-- dome
            +-- libSDL2.dylib
            +-- <Game> (This is a small runscript)
        +-- Resources
            +-- game.egg
            +-- icon.icns
            +-- other assets...

You only need to provide libSDL2.dylib if you are not using a statically linked version of dome. (If you are using an official DOME binary, you don’t need to worry.)

The runscript is very simple and looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
cd "${0%/*}"
./dome

Finally, the Info.plist at minimum needs to look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
  <string> <Game> </string>
  <key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
  <string>icon</string>
  <key>NSHighResolutionCapable</key>
  <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

The .app bundle, runscript and the CFBundleExecutable must all be named the same.

Doing this results in a self contained and easy to distribute application bundle.

Linux

Running your application on Linux should be reasonably simple. If you use a version with a statically linked version of SDL2, then you can just run the dome executable with a game.egg file in the same directory. If your binary is not statically linked, you’ll need to acquire a copy of the SDL2 shared library, and either install it globally, or store a local copy with dome.

Web

DOME has an experimental web engine, which you can use to run your application in a browser. To do this, you need to host the dome.html file and your game.egg file in the same directory on a server.

You may find that the performance of your application suffers when running in the browser, in which case this may not be a suitable method of distribution. DOME’s web engine does not currently support playing at full screen.