First and formost, I think that Verge3 is a heck of a lot more stable than Sphere. It does away with most of the GUI crap in the beginning too, which I think makes it a lot more attractive for releasing something that looks professional.

Second, Verge3 uses a proprietary language (but still similar to C), while Sphere uses Java (last I heard). This can be important if you are familiar with C and/or Java. From my experience, VC is way, way faster than Sphere's implementation of Java, so you will probably be able to make far more complex scripts with Verge3 than you will with Sphere and have it run at a respectable speed.

Both support 32-bit internal rendering, multiple resolutions, etc. I'm not aware of any benchmarks showing Sphere's relative graphics speed compared to Verge, so I don't think it's a real issue. Both seem to be on par graphicly for whatever you might want to do (although I think Sphere has some very rudimentary 3D functions for lines and triangles right out of the box).

Sphere uses it's own sound engine (which is open source), which provides pretty much every feature that FMOD, the engine that Verge3 uses, has. Verge3's sound implementation is not done at the moment, which means that some features like dopler effects and 3d sound positioning might be added in the future. It already supports stereo, modules, mp3s, oggs, and just about every other format you can throw at it. From what I've seen, Sphere's audio engine is just as good if not better right now.

As for the actual editing of your games, I'm very divided. Sphere seems to have a much more "visual studio" feel to it's editors, and I've tried them out for a while. Everything is divided up and organized pretty much exactly like the visual studio IDE, even with the ability to organize projects. And I hate it. I don't know why, it seems to be the ultimate, tested, tried and true solution, but I can't stand editing Sphere games. I think that even in their "beta" state, the Verge3 dev tools win hands down for simplicity and functionality. The main dev tool that you need for Verge3 is Maped, which comes bundled. The only other thing you really need is Notepad or some other text editor. For sheer simplicity, you can't beat that. Less complicated is good.

From the actual engine standpoint, both Verge3 and Sphere have entity systems, which are the little people you can have walking around your level. Both support pixel-based, 8 directional movement. Verge3 also supports pixel-based obstructions, something I don't think Sphere has, but it's been months since I've checked. Both support event scripting through "zones" that the player can step on. Both support concurrently running scripts.

In short, they pretty much have the same features, just different implementations. It probably wouldn't be OVERLY difficult to port a game from one system to the other. Both are EXTREMELY powerful in the sense that unlike engines like RPGMAKER, they let you do pretty much anything using the provided language. You aren't really bound by harcoded issues. With that power comes a price, however, and that price is the fact that it may take some time to get your game into a state where it seems like it is all coming together.

I personally like verge3 because I don't really like Sphere's dev tools OR the GUI that appears when you run the program. Verge3 is like the Linux of the game creation toolkit world: Simplicity, and POWER.

edit: If you are really interested in seeing the difference, download some games! There are several games offered for download here - I suggest getting the Timeless demo (available on the sidebar) and Zeux's World (available in the WinV2 section). Also, check out the contests section in the V3 files section to see some of the things that have come out of our recent contests!

Blargh.

Edit: This is really, really odd, but it seems like my posts count simply refuses to go up. It's been stuck like forever. :/

vecna said stuff:
I'll just add a little bit. Sphere and VERGE were design with very different philosophies. One of the biggest thing that turned me off about sphere is that you "install sphere" and then you install "sphere games". If you're someone like Grenideer who makes a huge game like Diver Down and you want to put it out for lots of non-GCE-oriented people to play, no one cares that its a VERGE game or a Sphere game or what. Your average guy that downloads a game like that has very little desire to install this "Sphere" thing, and then run sphere and pick the game he wanted to play in the first place from the sphere menu. This isn't really true at all.

Sphere does have builtin support for this notion, but it doesn't really dig too deeply into the engine. Sphere starts up, then runs a "startup game", which is ordinarily a game selection menu, as you said.

If this startup game just so happens to be the whole game in a stand-alone distribution, Sphere doesn't care. (this has been done in the past on multiple occasions)

Secondly, ECMAScript (aka JavaScript) is pretty hairy and gay, but it's still far and away a cut above VC in terms of how much a coder can get done in a given amount of time. None of this integer handle crap: just pass an object directly, or return it, or create an array and concatenate it to the end (resizing the array in the process). For all its syntactic weirdness, VC can't come anywhere close. (sure, it's slower, but it's worth it: most of the stuff that has to be fast is already done in C++)

Of course, using Sphere means putting up with its awful map editor and ass-backwards API... >_>

Add what to faqs??? :o

It really isn't a frequently asked question.

Feel free to add anything I said to the faqs. :D Especially if it's misinformative.

Who really cares about cross-platform? The vast majority of gamers use Windows PCs. If they have another OS, chances are they don't use it for gaming... Who expects a good gaming library on something like Linux anyway? ;)

The problem is that nothing works right in Linux. ;)

(the Linux port might get better once ATi gets of their fat asses and makes a 3D capable Linux driver for my video card)

Also, my policy has always been that I shall personally implement video playback just for the enterprising group who can demonstrate their ability to finish such an ambitious project. Thus far, nobody has been brave enough to approach me on the matter.

(I can't hope to be objective, of course: when I made ika, I set out specifically to make something better than Verge)

(but! ika can do anything and everything because it can connect to absolutely anything written to connect to Python)

(when I started writing this post, I actually thought I had a point I wanted to make. Sorry! (parenthesis are awesome (as long as you don't overuse them)))

I prefer Verge.

- It doesn't use yucky languages like Python
- Low amount of files required
- The crew behind Verge is not obnoxious
- It's oldschool (if i weren't a fan of oldschool, i wouldn't be making 2d games)
- Less penguins.

What I like about Ika.

- It attracts people we don't want in the Verge community.
- It's three letters, I don't waste too much energy bothering to type it.

Ika is most probably the more versatile engine, it was built for that purpose, I'm sure Andy is as awesome at coding as he is at annoying the hell out of me.

 Time to test masm32's text editor again.   


 Previously, it would reboot my computer.   


 Time to test it again.   


 woah   


*** the_Speed_Bump has quit IRC (Ping timeout)

I like andy because he has good quotes.

Heck, if you've got VergeC down, you can learn Python in an afternoon from the beginner's guide at http://www.python.org.

Verge 2.6 was good stuff. In fact, I'd go as far to say, functionally, that it's pretty much Verge3 minus the new data types.