Is Sparrow Discontinued?

Tanner85

Hello,
I used to code with Xcode and Sparrow years ago (last time was in 2014), now I have an half-made game to complete and I started to fix broken things... downloaded the new version of Xcode, etc etc.

But... I can't get anything to compile, so I came back to this forum just to realize nobody is posting for years now. So...

Is Sparrow dead? Please don't tell me I was wrong when I chose Sparrow instead of Cocos2D, back in the days... 😃

Chucky3000

I'm curious about the future of Sparrow too.
I don't think you chose wrong when you went with Sparrow over Cocos2D, as the latter seems to be at it's end too. Seems everyone is going with Unity these days...

Not to knock Unity, but whatever happened to the right tool for the job? Or having as lightweight a framework as possible? I mean, it seems that a 300MB "Hello World" is overkill.

You can probably get your old code to compile, but it's going to be a learning process for sure!

The massive stampede toward Unity makes me fear for the future of Apple's SpriteKit which has a delightfully easy API.
Speaking of APIs, check out John Sundell's game engine project. He's real big on API design. His engine works using UIKit and isn't as feature rich as other game frameworks, but it's still very interesting.
https://github.com/JohnSundell/ImagineEngine

Chucky3000

Following up on my learning process comment:

I tried building all of the example projects and they all failed. Some of the errors Xcode gives are simple to resolve and you learn a little something. (For example you have to set the 'Always_Search_User_Paths' to No in build settings.)

But it keeps complaining that it can't find "sparrow.h" even though it's RIGHT THERE. <chucky points at the screen>
This shows a hole in my knowledge about how Xcode manages projects files and what it does when it's compiling them. I'm sure more seasoned devs know exactly what's going on here, but I'm befuddled.

dpizzle

I recently had to update and old app. Downloaded from the v2 github https://github.com/Gamua/Sparrow-Framework/

Double clicked and compiled the demo and it ran fine on device and simulator. I'm using latest xcode and sdk.

Daniel

Sorry for my long silence on this – well, and all other topics on this forum!

Fact is: I haven't done any work on Sparrow for years. Even before I stopped development, lots of users moved to Sprite Kit (because Apple really seemed to push that back then) or, of course, Unity. A while, Robert (Carone) did a lot of great work to keep it in shape, but it was to no avail.

I think the final nail in the coffin was when Apple introduced Swift. To keep any relevance, Sparrow should have been completely rewritten in Swift – but without a relevant user base to support that, this was just too much work.

Thus, it just left hanging around as it was – and mostly, it should still work, because we always tried to keep it lightweight and depend on just the minimal Apple APIs. The main changes are probably updating Xcode projects, documentation, etc.

I agree that having a lightweight API and "right tool for the job" would be fantastic. However, one could argue that Sprite Kit is just that, nowadays. And many game developers (rightfully) want to create their games in a cross-platform way. (Compared to business- or lifestyle apps, games tend to get away with not having a 100% native look & feel.)

It's just a lot of work to keep such a framework in shape – and with all the competition, it's hard to justify rebooting Sparrow. Heck, if I'd be working on an iOS-only game, I'd probably do it anyway! 😉 But it doesn't look as if I get the chance anytime soon.

I'm sorry that I haven't got any better news! I always loved working on Sparrow. I still think it was a nice framework with just the right level of abstraction and closeness to the native APIs. 🙂