need documentation / doxygen
gus0650 opened this issue · 13 comments
Hello, i am new to the Amiga and would like to use ACE and Visual Studio Code to learn game development on the Amiga.
However, i noticed that the documentation is still lacking important parts. Any plans to make that happen anytime soon?
I am no good with reverse engineering so the lack of documentation is a dealbreaker for me.
it is a shame really, such a nice engine but then incomplete docu...
I am willing to donate money to the project if it is used to create documentation.
I am also thinking to donate code to the project (thinking of a tilemap engine and font system).
there are font and tile systems, they just need... documentation. 👀
I write docs on-demand so let me know what do you have currently problem with or what is most urgent. If you could come up with a list ordered by priority I'll try to give it a bite at say, top 3 things.
thanks for the quick response. in the "docs" folder i see there is already some good documentation, just incomplete. i guess the most urgent chapters be 5, 6, 10 an 12. basically everything one needs to know to make a simple game. i dont want to use the state machine, i would prefer just starting from main() and then step by step know how to load an image, display it on screen, make some sprites and move them around, detect collision between the sprites and the background. then at a later time i would like to do vertical scrolling, and dual playfield. play some sound effects. thats it. keep it very simple, no fancy tricks.
a good overview of all the classes would be awesome. doxygen / javadoc / autodoc style. just to see whats there and what is does.
professionally i work with Unity engine who have pretty good documentation and many small code examples. so maybe that can serve as inspiration. i just love it when i can quickly look things up and can get into the flow of programming without having to "trip" over undocumented aspects of the code that i cant figure out.
with good docu, this looks like it could be great fun!
alrighty, I'll try to write something up and also update the doxygen part 'cuz it's there, but not everywhere and overview thingy is definitely missing.
you can see current state of doxygen here: https://codedocs.xyz/AmigaPorts/ACE/ or if you click the "code|documented" badge in the readme. I'll add the link in the docs folder in appropriate section.
This needs proper housekeeping though - although there are doxycomments in .h files, the web-based documentation doesn't see them, most probably because files lack the comment with @file tag. If you navigate through what's already in class list or class members, you'll see something's working, but it's working badly.
It's all pretty much work in progress, unfortunately - I was mainly focusing on adding functionality required for my games, not the docs. Until I clean this up, your best bet is to try to run one of the games, hack around it and try to make something of your own from it.
thanks, the doxygen helps!
any chance of writing chapter 5 and 6 anytime soon? basically i at this point i just want to load an image and display that on screen
will do tomorrow!
Chapter 5 is now live in its initial version. I'll try to do chapter 6 tomorrow, but it's a bit of writing to be done:
- add moving ball (perhaps to chapter 5)
- convert palettes to ACE format
- convert bitmaps to ACE format
- load palette from file and use it in game's view
- load bitmaps from files
- draw bitmaps without mask
- create blank bitmap for storing background for undraw
- draw bitmaps with mask
so if it won't be finished tomorrow it'll be probably a day after.
you, my friend, are awesome!
Next chapter is ready. I have however split remaining stuff into more chapters, so it's still not 100% complete. Expect more tomorrow!
EDIT: I've added chapter on undrawing blitter objects.
I've added chapter for drawing masked blits.
Next on the list is drawing text as well as optimizing blitter usage.