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A quote from GameGuru Loader User Guide:


It suggest that lack of features which would benefit windows games are absent as a conscious choice. The title "AppGameKit" gives the same impression.

Yet, AGK2 can compile for windows, has windows-specific commands and a VR DLC. And I have seen several game project here that are intended for Windows.

I feel that I'm getting a bit of mixed signals. This has always been something that bothered me a bit. I could never really shake the feeling that the language is intended for mobile apps.

AGK was intended for mobile development but is perfectly capable of windows games. GameGuru is something else. I believe AppGameKit uses OpenGL whereas gameguru relies on DX.

Don't let that quote misguide you. AppGameKit is excellent for PC/Mac game development. However it also includes large sets of optional commands to utilize mobile sensors for touch, acceleration, GPS etc. to make porting between them much easier.

Many users have developed free and commercial desktop products with AppGameKit including some now released on Steam (Echoes+, Rush to Adventure, Painter's Playground, Santa's Workshop and others). I myself won the $10k grand prize in one of Intel's game development challenges where I used AppGameKit exclusively to create a simple desktop game some years back.

The real meaning of that excerpt is that GameGuru is built using a completely incompatible framework than AGK2 (DirectX vs. OpenGL). So Game Guru's content does not easily translate into something usable in AppGameKit, and is instead built exclusively for Windows. Meanwhile since AGK2 uses OpenGL/WebGL/OpenGL ES technologies it can develop and run games and apps equally well on mobile and PC.

The GameGuru Loader (which is a third party utility) attempts to bridge the gap by doing all the heavy lifting to convert GameGuru content into something runnable via AppGameKit (OpenGL). The developer has in many ways improved and made more efficeint GameGuru content through AppGameKit and has proven it is perfectly capable of running such content.

My own thoughts from the very beginning with GameGuru/FPSC:Reloaded was that it should had been developed using OpenGL/AGK as the underlying engine. This would've allowed both that product and AppGameKit to rapidly evolve as new features to support advanced 3D opperations would be added. But the decision was made to instead develop it using the aged DirectX 9 DBPro platform, which is Windows-only. The original reasoning as I recall was that this would be the fastest route to getting the product completed since the original FPSC was also built from DBP. But six years later and several major rewrites to GG due to the sluggish and obsolete portions of DBP/DirectX I'm not convinced that was a wise decision and it effectively ruled out portability for GG except using third party tools like GameGuru Loader when possible.

Thanks, that makes sense! I never gotten into GameGuru itself, but converting using GameGuru Loader has given me loads of stuff for AGK2:

623 audio files
5099 3D objects (textured)
17 sky boxes
Lotsa textures

And the manual says that the GameGuru Loader also supports this:


Which I'd like to get to play with too! However, not so sure where this stuff is at.

I've released several windows games made in AppGameKit on steam. so have others I know. even if it's not "intended" for it, its is very capable.

I think that right there sums up AGK's professional viability for the desktop. Btw, that's awesome congrats!

there's a comma - it doesn't say AppGameKit can't do PC games, it says AppGameKit handles them differently and so GG files should be converted for better compatibility (the other reason is so GG loader projects can run on either PC or mobile, just like AppGameKit, while GG is purely PC)

for anyone curious: without optimization a standard GG game converted with GG loader will run at around the same speed in AppGameKit as it does in GG, so there really is little performance difference between the 2, you just get way more control in AppGameKit of course.