GDevelop/GDevelop.js

GDevelop.js

This is the port of GDevelop core classes to WebAssembly+JavaScript. This allows GDevelop Core libraries to run in a browser or on Node.js.

🎮 GDevelop is a full-featured, cross-platform, open-source game development software requiring no programming skills. Download it on the official website.

How to build

👋 Usually, if you're working on the GDevelop editor or extensions in JavaScript, you don't need to rebuild GDevelop.js. If you want to make changes in C++ extensions or classes, read this section.

• Prerequisite tools installed:

  • CMake 3.17+ (3.5+ should work on Linux/macOS). On macOS, you can install it via Homebrew (recommended for Apple M1 Architectures).
  • Node.js. (We recommend using nvm to be able to switch between Node versions easily).
  • Python (via pyenv for versions management).

• Install Emscripten, as explained below or on the Emscripten installation instructions:

Linux/macOS	Windows
git clone https://github.com/juj/emsdk.git	git clone https://github.com/juj/emsdk.git
cd emsdk	cd emsdk
git pull	git pull
./emsdk install 1.39.6	emsdk install 1.39.6
./emsdk activate 1.39.6	emsdk activate 1.39.6
source ./emsdk_env.sh	emsdk_env.bat

⚠️ If you are on Apple M1, this version of emsdk may not be available for this architecture and you will get an error when installing it, indicating a missing binary. If this is the case, a workaround is to modify the emsdk.py line 132 with machine = 'x86_64' to ensure a correct binary is downloaded.

• Launch the build from GDevelop.js folder:

    cd GDevelop.js
    npm install
    npm run build

⚠️ If the npm install fails, relaunch it in a different terminal using a recent Node.js and npm version (to avoid using the old npm version from Emscripten).

ℹ️ Output is created in /path/to/GD/Binaries/embuild/GDevelop.js/ and also copied to GDevelop 5 IDE (newIDE folder).

-> ⏱ The linking (last step) of the build can be made a few seconds faster by specifying -- --dev. Be sure to remove it before building a release version, as this disable "link-time optimizations" of the generated WebAssembly module.

• You can then launch GDevelop 5 that will use your build of GDevelop.js:

    cd ..
    cd newIDE/app
    npm install
    npm start

More information in GDevelop 5 readme.

Tests

npm test

About the internal steps of compilation

The npm build task:

• Creates Binaries/embuild directory,
• Launches CMake inside to compile GDevelop with emconfigure to use Emscripten toolchain,
• Updates the glue.cpp and glue.js from Bindings.idl using Emscripten WebIDL Binder,
• Launches the compilation with make (or ninja on Windows with CMake 3.17+) (you can also compile using MinGW-32 using npm run build-with-MinGW).

See the CMakeLists.txt for the arguments passed to the Emscripten linker.

Documentation

• The file Bindings.idl describes all the classes available in GDevelop.js.
• Refer to GDevelop documentation for detailed documentation of the original C++ classes.