Monkey X

Monkey

Monkey was released on March 1, 2011 by Mark Sibly of Blitz Research Ltd.

Monkey X

In December 2013, Monkey was re-branded as Monkey X.

The free versions of Monkey X released currently include unrestricted use of the HTML5 and GLFW (desktop) targets; see Mojo (framework). The open source distribution of Monkey's compiler is written in Monkey, and therefore requires a valid binary distribution to be compiled. Before December 2013, Monkey X's compiler (Transcc) could not be compiled and used by those who had not bought full licenses of Monkey X. In late 2014, Blitz Research partnered with Playniax to make a bundle containing the Ignition X framework, as well as a standard "Monkey X Pro" license.

In January 2015, "Monkey X Studio" was added to the official website's "Store" section. This acts as a bundle of third-party software, as well as the existing software from the official commercial distribution. This bundle includes: Jungle IDE and Font Machine (A third-party IDE, and font generation tool, both respectively by LemonBytes). The Ignition X framework. And finally, a full "Monkey X Pro" distribution.

Monkey 2

Monkey 2 v1.0.0 was released on 30 June 2016.

Mojo (framework)

Mojo is the official/commercial application framework for the Monkey X programming language. Mojo has been written for all of Monkey X's official game-based targets, this is done using the native programming languages of each target. Mojo is then wrapped using Monkey X's "external-language" system. Mojo was designed primarily for writing simple 2D games in Monkey X, but like many other APIs, it can also be used for other types of programs. Like Monkey X itself, one of Mojo's goals are to make everything it provides as consistent as possible on all of its supported platforms.

Mojo itself is open source, however, not all implementations are provided openly. Currently the GLFW and HTML5 implementations (Native code) of Mojo are open source. Mojo may be implemented using any language by anyone. The official implementations for the other targets are commercial products, sold by Blitz Research on Monkey X's website.

Along with the application portion of the framework, Mojo provides graphics, sound, and device input functionality on several targets. Mojo's device-input functionality is built to be "virtualizable" through its native implementations. An example of this being the framework's "touch" input functionality, which some targets "virtualize" using traditional mouse input. The same goes for various targets when handling mouse input. Similar examples of this can be found on mobile platforms for keyboard input. Mojo's input functionality also provides several forms of keyboard functionality, accelerometer support, and game controller support. Because of this framework's design philosophies, games made using Mojo tend to look identical when deployed to other platforms, despite sometimes being based on drastically different technologies.

Mojo supports several image and audio formats. Due to the nature of Mojo, some frameworks are only supported on specific platforms. The way resources are used may also change what formats are supported. For example, Mojo provides a specific music framework, separate from its other audio functionality. This framework may support different formats, depending on the target. A brief rundown of supported formats can be found in Monkey X's official documentation.

Mojo has been implemented officially and unofficially for several platforms. Underlying technologies vary between targets, however, several of the targets support OpenGL. Because of this, OpenGL modules are available for these platforms. This functionality is currently dependent on the Mojo framework.

Mojo does not currently use the WebGL framework for its HTML5 and JavaScript versions, however, a member of Monkey X's community known as Devolonter has done it himself. WebGL is in fact delegated as a generic OpenGL implementation when using the HTML5 target.

The Mojo framework has also seen several "extensions" (Official platform-specific functionality) in the past. A good example of this being display-management. Some of these platform-specific "extensions" were first provided as a part of target-specific modules (External to Mojo). Future support for target-specific modules' implementations has yet to be commented upon, and may become deprecated. Functionality provided by Mojo can be assumed as the preferred option.

Mojo has become known to Monkey X's community as an effective cross-platform utility; however, some small features can be inconsistent on specific platforms. Such inconsistencies tend to be documented as such, and sometimes "ignored" on compile-time.

Several third party frameworks take advantage of Mojo, examples of this can be found in several of Monkey X's "user modules". Additionally, it is perfectly possible to write an alternative framework built on the same implementation-level as Mojo. Such a framework would be able to share common functionality with Mojo, by using several of the same modules. For details, please see: Game targets (technical).

Development roadmap

On May 14, 2015, Mark Sibly, the creator of Monkey, announced the development of Mojo2, a new graphics API intended to supersede the first Mojo module's graphical functionality. The first release of the Mojo2 module came to owners of Pro versions of Monkey X on June 14, 2015. It was released alongside version 84a.

Official targets

Unofficial targets

Most Monkey X unofficial and community-driven targets are at the official community's User Targets section.

Notable games made with it

Game targets (technical)

_{All information provided is based on the official source code released by Blitz Research on GitHub, as well as any other contributed source code in the public repository. For a full list of official targets, please see: Official targets.}

Game targets are defined as targets which have implementations of the 'BBGame' class. The 'BBGame' class is an externally/natively implemented class described by the official 'brl.gametarget' module (GitHub). This class is used by frameworks such as Mojo as a platform for target-specific application-functionality. Functionality provided by the 'BBGame' class is privately imported, then wrapped in a controlled form by Mojo. The official targets' native 'BBGame' implementations are provided as open source. This does not directly apply to frameworks like Mojo.

Therefore, it is possible to re-implement open source, or even proprietary backends for the Mojo framework, this would still require several components to be implemented, however. This is generally discouraged on official targets, due to the commercial nature of Mojo.

Monkey X does not need game-targets to work, targets such as the standard C++ tool (STDCPP) target do not explicitly require a BBGame implementation. Also, most of the official targets do not require implementation of BBGame, either. They do require implementations for frameworks such as Mojo, however. This also means that Monkey X's official compiler (external dependencies disregarded) could technically be built with most (If not all) of the official targets.