view doc/Readme.txt @ 26:611f7b9063c6

Changed the licensing and removed a few dead files. Changed licensing to "GPL version 2 or later" to avoid future compatibility issues. Also a unittest fix to the previous commit. committer: Diggory Hardy <diggory.hardy@gmail.com>
author Diggory Hardy <diggory.hardy@gmail.com>
date Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:15:02 +0100
parents 56a42ec95024
children 07bd1a09e161
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Copyright © 2007-2008 Diggory Hardy
License: GNU General Public License version 2 or later (see COPYING)

Some brief info:

Platforms:
I work on mde using linux and perform most testing on this platform.
I have done a little testing on Windows, but currently it's highly likely there may be problems on this platform.

Build instructions:
dsss build
Then run the executable in bin/

Testing:
dsss clean		(this is important if a previous build exists!)
dsss build bin/mdeTest

Credits:
Me (Diggory Hardy) for just about everything in mde as of now.

Also thanks to:
Walter Bright and Digital Mars for D and DMD.
The tango team for Tango.



--- Goal ---

Mde is an attempt to build a game engine.

It is my second serious attempt at a game engine, following on from ge118 (http://diggory.hardy.googlepages.com/ge118). GE118 was written in C++, starting from some basic OpenGL and SDL tests and some of my early ideas about implementing an engine, and was heavily revised over time as I learned more about programming.

Mde − a Modular D (game-oriented) Engine − was started after I discovered D, and decided I wanted to make a clean start. The acronym starts "modular" because, from experience working on ge118, I had discovered that tightly-related module dependancies (and worse, circular dependancies) caused many difficulties while programming and prevented good designs of components; thus I wanted to separate each part of the project in order to enable better design and facilitate developing a replacement for a part of the program (in case someone would wish to do so).

It is not a library, since:
a)  IMO, different games using the same engine should, where possible (which should be the case with an open source engine) share the same executable and only use config/command line arguments to select the different game.
b)  The source is tied together so tightly and is only designed to be used in one way; thus there seems little point organising it as a library and example app.
Anyway, anyone wanting to use it as a library need only remove mde/mde.d and compile it.


--- FAQ (or just a few questions) ---

+ How many lines are there?
# wc -l $(find . -name "*.d")
As of last count, that was 3908.

+ Why is the code so DENSE?
That's just my coding style (I still mostly stick to the D style guide). I like code to look neat, but I don't like spacing it out a lot because then it takes more room (more scrolling) and IMO it becomes harder to visualise what goes on.

+ What toolkits/external libraries are used?
    tango
    tango.scrapple
    SDL (possibly will be replaced)

+ What libraries are planned to be used?
    OpenGL (of course...)
    OpenAL (most likely; however audio support is a LONG way off)
    Schooner: GLD & fonts (or conversions to tango) ?
    GLFW ?