Hi All,
I was looking into creating a visual novel over the past week and I came across your great engine (among others). I was more or less hoping to find one that ran within it's own program, but the simplicity of an xml file I just couldn't pass up.
I found a post here with a server setup guide (which IMO was too long and involved for such a simple task)
I threw together a (slightly modified config) version of Windows Webserver (can be found here:
http://www.mwiede.de/windows-php-webserver/) I call it Mini M-, I mean, Web Story Server.
18 MB zipped, 41 MB extracted, comes complete with a "Start Game.exe", "Close Game.exe" and a "game" folder where your story goes, in a fully portable package. The "Start Game.exe" starts up the server and a browser window straight to the game, the "Close Game.exe" shuts down the server, a simple and easy solution to locally running your story.
Link:
http://64.37.58.9/web_story_server.zip (hosted on my server)
Let me know what you think. (tested on Windows 7 64 bit, though should work on anything from 2000 to Win 8)
Hi @Spyder810 and welcome to the forums!
I can't test it right now since I normally use Linux, but I'll take a look later. Thanks for sharing!
Did you know? There's also work being done on a cross-platform container app by @Trixar_za. You can find that here:
https://iiyo.org/f/discussion/35/webstor...-container
Have to admit that creating a program to stop the server never crossed my mind. I did have the idea to make a web server that calls the browser though. I'd still prefer a version that included the browser with the server and which killed the server when you closed the container app. That still requires me to work out how to make Vala kill the server thread when I exit the window :/
But between the two us, we've now created ways to run WSE games on Windows and Linux. So portability is just getting better for WSE...
I was going to throw in chromium portable and run it as an application (same size as the game) but it makes the package significantly larger another 45MB+. I also looked into other small portable browsers, none that I found handled HTML5 properly (so the game didn't load). I guess I could make a second package with it.
My close server exe is just a simple kill process command (was quick and easy to throw together at the time), making something all in one with crossplatform support would probably be significantly more involved.
Which is why I'm writing my own customized browser app for it using GTK and Webkit. The trouble is integrating the server (which uses GIO) into application. It starts the server thread alright, but it doesn't kill it when you exit the app.
I'm a noob at Vala applications and object oriented programming in general, so I'm struggling a bit. Since Vala can be
compiled on Windows, porting shouldn't be too hard. Maybe I should just post the code on Github and see if you guys can help me figure it out.
I just had a look at the Vala page on Wikipedia... I have to say, looks interesting. A language that is both object-oriented and has closures and lambdas and that also compiles to C code, so basically runs on any plattform AND is compatible with the C ABI. Can you recommend a good page to learn more about it, @Trixar_za? The Gnome page about the language is a bit... lacking.
Anyway, I really hope that we will have standardized native browser APIs (file system access, device access etc.) in at least Chrome and Firefox some time. Then we don't need a container app at all...
That's part of the problem with Vala - it lacks proper beginner level
tutorial on how to use it. It does have a
few examples that show you the ropes, but otherwise you're pretty much on your own. The guy that wrote the server code I'm using has a few good examples on his site too:
http://www.jezra.net/blog/tagged/Vala
I'm not sure if you still need help but I've been using: Http File Server, its freeware and easy to use. Just drag your html files over to the window and click the Open in browser button. No real setup required took less than 8 mins.
I've actually been messing around with my own little web server that I made from the web server code used in pywse. It can probably be compiled into an exe file with a program that can be run to start it, while turning it off is as simple as closing the command line window.