Here’s the new hilariously bad setup tutorial video

We’ve been hard at work in the last few days to finish up our new setup UI and the way libgdx projects are organized. Starting today, all libgdx projects can be compiled and packaged via Eclipse, Intellij IDEA and the command line. This was made possible by using Gradle, a build and dependency management system that’s also used by the latest Android development tools. This new setup has a few benefits:

Develop with Eclipse, Intellij IDEA and command line

Continuous integration by packaging your apps on the command line/shell

No more jars, just specify your 3rd party libraries in the build.gradle file

Switch between libgdx releases and nightlies by setting gdx.version in the build.gradle file

GWT Super Dev Mode is now the default run mode

Follow these steps if you want to give it a try:

Changes for existing Eclipse users

If you want to migrate to the Gradle based build, you’ll have to generate a new project and move your code and assets over. We do not provide a converter as that’s a huge, error prone task.

You also have to install a new plugin called the Eclipse Gradle Integration by Springsource. This makes Eclipse understand Gradle based projects. You can install it via this update site: http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/gradle

Note that the way GWT projects are executed has changed. We now invoke a Gradle task to run super dev mode instead of promoting the use of the normal Dev Mode, which is extremely slow and doesn’t represent the Javascript compiled behaviour of your app.

Also, there are not linked assets folders anymore! This means that you have to set the working directory of your desktop project to android/assets/!. If you don’t do this, your desktop app won’t find your assets.

You will also notice that there are no JAR files anywhere anymore, neither are their any native libraries. This is all managed by Gradle. The JAR files are stored outside of your project’s directories. This is nice as the JARs and native libraries will never polute your version control system!

Another upside is that it’s now super easy to switch between release and nightly builds. The build.gradle file in the root directory of your app has a constant called gdx.version. Just set it to whatever you want, e.g. 0.9.9 for the last release, or 1.0-SNAPSHOT for the latest nightly.

If you work with nightlies, you’ll get the latest version every time you update your Gradle project automatically!

We will still feature the old gdx-setup-ui for a while, but be warned that this will go away eventually!

Now go and give it a try. Please report any issues you have on the issue tracker!