Tutorial #2: Using GMP in a Palm application

These are the steps to getting the GMP game engine working in a Palm WebOS application.  Thanks to Nigel Kelly for writing this tutorial!

  1. Create a new palm app with the name myGmpGame.
  2. Open the file index.html in the base of the game directory.
  3. You will see something like the following: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head> <title>myGmpGame</title> <script src="/usr/palm/frameworks/mojo/mojo.js" type="text/javascript" x-mojo-version="1" /> <!-- application stylesheet should come in after the one loaded by the framework --> <link href="stylesheets/mygmpgame.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <h2>This text verifies your application is running.</h2> <p> To create a fully functional Palm application create a scene and remove this text from index.html. See the documentation on Palm Applications for more information on creating applications and scenes. </p> </body> </html>
  4. The palm mojo framework is already included in the head of the file. To include the GMP game engine, copy the gmp-engine.js file to the base application directory, then add the following lines into the <body> section of index.html: <script type="text/javascript" src="gmp-engine.1.7.3.js"></script>
  5. Now create a new file called game.js in the base app directory (on the same level as gmp-engine.js). We'll be putting the hello world game tutorial code in here. Include the game.js file in the <body> section, below the gmp-engine.js file, as follows: <script type="text/javascript" src="gmp-engine.1.7.3.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="game.js"></script>
  6. Now go through the hello world tutorial, and take care to do the following:
    1. game.js replaces hello-world.js
    2. mygmpgame.css replaces hello-world.css
    3. The Palm Pre keyboard has no arrow keys, so change the left and right arrow keys to 'Z' and 'X'
  7. Now run the app in the device or emulator, and hey presto, you have a new little game to play!