Rail Climber

The game at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.holak.railclimber

See also https://www.holak.net/how_to_make_an_area-based_2d_smoke_effect_that_doesn_t_suck

Rewrite in progress, not fully functional at the moment!

Bit of a back story

I created the original version of this game in 2012 as an entry into a competition at my university.

Since then, I made some occasional improvements and added support for more platforms. I wanted to release the source code, but it was pretty ugly, written in a hurry, etc.

So I started rewriting certain parts little by little, but just didn't care enough to finish it.

The rest of the docs is slightly outdated. It will be updated when I have some time.

Environment setup

As a cross-platform game, the development environment differs between platforms. The currently supported ones are:

• Android, with the Eclipse ADT plugin for now (will move to Android Studio later once the NDK support is finished)
• Tizen, using the official Tizen SDK
• Desktop (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), using the cmake build tool. You can have cmake generate project files for pretty much any C++ IDE or just use it directly with CLion.
• iOS (WIP)
• emscripten (WIP)
• Raspberry Pi (WIP)

Desktop

The following instructions are for the MinGW toolkit in the msys2 environment. They assume you don't have anything installed yet. If you already have MinGW installed, skip/adjust the steps that don't apply to you. The required setup for Visual Studio should be fairly similar.

If you use CLion, just open the directory with CMakeLists.txt (build\sdl), then press Ctrl+Shift+A and look for Change Project Root. Then change the project root to the top directory of RailClimber. You might also need to install some of the libraries that RailClimber uses into your toolchain.

On Linux, read the Linux section below. Most or all of the required packages should available in your distribution's repository, so the setup ends up being the simplest there.

On Mac OS X, you can install cmake and most of the dependencies from Homebrew and just use the same steps as on Linux.

Setting up MinGW

• Download and install msys2.
• Open the msys2 shell (should be in your start menu)
• Install mingw with pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-make
• Install the following packages
  • mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2
  • mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_image
  • mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_mixer
  • mingw-w64-x86_64-SDL2_ttf
  • mingw-w64-x86_64-glew
  • mingw-w64-x86_64-glm
  • mingw-w64-x86_64-box2d
  • mingw-w64-x86_64-expat

Installing cmake

Not much to it. Just download and install cmake. If you already have cmake installed, be careful about the setup in the following section.

Put mingw into your PATH

Setting environment variables in Windows kinda sucks unless you have this handy tool. We'll be setting the User Variables (right half of the application).

For the compilation to work correctly, the mingw part of msys2 needs to be in PATH Right-click PATH, select Add value and locate the directory where you installed msys2 followed by \mingw64\bin.

Save all the changes. If you had the cmake GUI running, restart it.

Using cmake and compiling

In addition to the option of calling cmake from the command line, it also comes with a convenient GUI tool.

In this tool:

• click Browse Source..., locate the rail-climber/build/sdl directory
• in the Where to build the binaries, put in the same path as in source, followed by /build (e.g. C:\ ... \rail-climber\build\sdl\build)

Click Configure.

The configuration should succeed. This will be indicated by a Configuring done line at the bottom of the output (in the bottom part of the window). Press Generate. Now you can exit the cmake GUI tool.

Building from the command line

You can always build the project by simply running make in the build/sdl/build directory (after generating the Makefile with cmake). The resulting RailClimber.exe will be put into the bin directory.

Linux

Install packages for all the libraries mentioned above from your distribution's repositories. If you use a distribution that puts the development files into separate packages, you will need the -dev package for each library.

For example in Debian, the packages you need to install would be libsdl2-dev, libsdl2-image-dev, libsdl2-mixer-dev, libsdl2-ttf-dev, libglew-dev, libbox2d-dev, libexpat1-dev, libglm-dev.

Then of course, you need cmake, gcc, and g++.

Once all that's done, just create the rail-climber/build/sdl/build directory and enter it. There, run

cmake ..

Now you can build the binary with make.

Mac OS X

Same as Linux, except the packages are installed form homebrew or whatever other package manager you use.

Android

Coming soon, but basically you just import the project into Eclipse and set the environment variable for where the Android NDK is installed.

Build files for required external libraries Box2D and expat are included, you just add the source files (actually later those will probably be included with the project as well).

Tizen

Just import the project into Eclipse...

Actually you also need to compile Box2D and expat for Tizen, but generally you just download them, create a new static library project in Eclipse, import all the source files and press build project.

iOS

TODO, including dependency setup

emscripten

TODO, especially dependency setup

Raspberry Pi

TODO, this will most like use cmake as well