Path: | README |
Last Update: | Sun May 18 00:12:44 -0400 2008 |
Rubygame is a cross-platform game-development extension and library for Ruby, inspired by Pygame. The purpose of Rubygame is to empower game developers by providing them with powerful and flexible high-level concepts. Instead of worrying about low-level technical details, you can focus your energy on more interesting things (like making a fun game).
Rubygame‘s core is written in C to bind low-level SDL functions into Ruby. On top of that is a pure Ruby library for higher-level behavior like event and game object management.
You will definitely need these software packages to compile Rubygame:
It‘s highly recommended that you have these packages as well, or some cool features won‘t be available!
(If you don‘t have some of those, you have to disable those features by passing some flags to the build process. See "Advanced Install", below.)
If you are compiling source on a binary-based Linux ditribution, you will also need the "dev" packages of ruby, SDL, SDL_gfx, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, and SDL_ttf. (Really, you just need the header files.)
And of course, if you are compiling the source, you will need a C compiler! These versions of gcc worked fine when I tried them; other compilers might work too:
Extract the archive and enter its top directory. Then run ($ indicates as user, # as root):
$ rake build # rake install
The build and install tasks can be configured by providing certain commands to rake:
no-sdl-gfx: | do not build modules which depend on SDL_gfx |
no-sdl-image: | do not build modules which depend on SDL_image |
no-sdl-mixer: | do not build modules which depend on SDL_mixer |
no-sdl-ttf: | do not build modules which depend on SDL_ttf |
no-opengl: | do not build modules which depend on OpenGL |
no-sdl-config: | do not guess compiler/linker flags using `sdl-config‘ |
debug: | build modules with debbugging flags enabled |
universal: | on MacOS X, try to compile for both PPC and Intel |
verbose: | display the build commands as they are run |
Additionally, the build process respects certain environmental variables. In particular, CFLAGS and LDFLAGS are important for users compiling with the no-sdl-config command.
CC: | C compiler command |
CFLAGS: | flags passed to the C compiler |
LDSHARED: | linker command |
LDFLAGS: | flags passed to the linker |
RUBYARCHDIR: | where to install platform-specific compiled extensions |
RUBYLIBDIR: | where to install platform-independent interpreted libs |
IMPORTANT: if you are missing any optional SDL_* libraries, you must specify "no-*" flags for those libraries. For example, if you don‘t have SDL_gfx:
$ rake no-sdl-gfx build
If you don‘t disable the features, the compile will probably fail when it looks for the headers and libraries. (The build system is not smart enough to automatically disable missing features.)
You can generate documentation for Rubygame‘s API by running:
# rake rdoc
Documentation will be generated as HTML in the ‘html’ directory. Open ‘html/index.html’ in a web browser to get started.
See the documentation (online at rubygame.sourceforge.net, or generated locally with the ‘rake rdoc’ command).
We also recommend that you take a peek at the demo applications in the ‘samples’ directory, especially chimp.rb.
Rubygame is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser GPL. See LICENSE for more details.
Some of the sample files are distributed under licenses other than the GNU Lesser GPL. See ‘samples/README’ and ‘samples/GPL’ for more details.
John Croisant (jacius at users.sourceforge.net)