Hello muties,
Thought I would make this simple quick start guide for people, who like me, don't have a lot of prior Mac experience, and who are struggling to understand how to get started using WME Lite to make an iOS game.
It is by no means a complete guide, and I make no claims as to its overall accuracy. It is simply what I have learnt, and what I have done, to get a game running on my iPhone. It should be used mostly as a jumping off point to get you started.
So, to get a game up and running on your iOS device you need 6 things:
1) A Mac
2) Xcode (downloaded from the app store on your Mac)
3) The WME Lite source code
4) The dependencies for graphics and sound
5) The data.dcp file from your Wintermute project.
6) An iOS developer account.
The source codeThe source code cannot be downloaded in a simple .zip file as you might normally expect. It is stored online in a "repository". A repository, as I understand it, is simply a place online that is used to easily manage project code. In order to download the source code, you need to connect to this repository with a client. Once connected, you then "checkout", which will download the files contained within the repository to a folder you specify.
Downloading the source codeLuckily Xcode on your Mac has a built in client that will allow you to connect to the repository and download the source code.
When you open Xcode you should be presented with a "Welcome to Xcode" screen. The second option down is labelled "Connect to repository". You should click that.
You should then be presented with a screen asking for a "location". In this "location" field, you should enter
http://wmelite.googlecode.com/svnAfter you enter the address, it should say underneath that the "Host is reachable", and give you a new button marked "checkout". Click "checkout".
A familiar "save as" window will then pop up. In the "save as" field, enter the name that you wish to use for the folder where the files will be downloaded. Then navigate to the location where you want this folder to be. I just put it in the general "document" location. Then click "checkout" again. It will then say it's "checking out" and the files will be downloaded into the folder you specified.
The dependenciesTo download these dependencies, simply go to
http://code.google.com/p/wmelite/downloads/list and download the file marked
dep_xcode-ios.zip Download them straight to your Mac as it's just quicker than downloading them to PC and transferring them.
Once downloaded, double click the .zip file to "expand" the files into a new folder. This is just like "extracting" them on your PC. Open this new folder.
Open a new "finder" window, go to the folder where you downloaded the repository files, and navigate to the folder
trunk/xcode-ios/depSelect the unzipped dependency files and drag them over to the "dep" folder.
Your data.dcp fileCopy this over to your Mac, and place it in the
trunk/xcode-ios/wmelite folder.
Opening the Xcode project fileIn the
trunk/xcode-ios/wmelite folder, you will see a file called wmelite.xcodeproj. If you double click that, it will automatically load the WME Lite iOS Xcode project file.
At the top, select iPad/iPhone simulator, and click the play button to run the game in the simulator. Keep in mind though that the simulator doesn't really replicate an actual device at all, so it's best to test the game on a real device.
Running the game on a real deviceIn order to test the game on a device, you need to do 4 things:
1) Create and download a developer certificate.
2) Create an App ID.
3) Register your devices.
4) Create and download a provisioning profile to each device.
This is perhaps the most difficult area of the whole process to grasp, at least for me anyway, but there is a quick introductory guide here:
http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/Testing_Apps_on_the_iPhone_%E2%80%93_Developer_Certificates_and_Provisioning_ProfilesAnd plenty more in depth information in the iOS Developer Library here:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/ToolsLanguages/Conceptual/DevPortalGuide/Introduction/Introduction.htmlThat's it. Hope this post is useful.
