About this library
ae (fully named ArmageddonEngine) was initially intended to be the open-source part of an ambitious D rewrite of the 1999 video game "Worms Armageddon", of which I am a maintainer. As the library accumulated code and found use in various projects, its original purpose diminished. In the future, if there is sufficient reason for it (e.g. to allow static linking), it may be split up into multiple libraries.
License
Most of this library is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0.
Modules under licenses other than MPL are:
ae.utils.digest_murmurhash3- D port of a C MurmurHash3 implementation. Public Domain.ae.utils.graphics.fonts.font8x8- Data for an 8x8 bitmap font created by Daniel Hepper. Public Domain.ae.utils.graphics.hls- Code to convert between RGB and HLS. Ported from a Microsoft Knowledge Base article. License unclear.ae.utils.text.parsefp- Parse floating-point values from strings. Adapted from Phobos. Boost License 1.0.
Using this library
For a complete-newbie Windows tutorial of setting up ae and building an SDL game demo, see here.
This library is not meant to be compiled as a static (.lib, .a) or shared (.dll, .so) library. Do not attempt to do so; you will run into problems with multiple entry points, dependencies you may not need, and other problems. Instead, it is intended to be used as a source library, together with a dependency-discovering build tool (e.g. rdmd).
The recommended way to use the library is to set it up as a git external in your project's root, as seen here. This will link your project with a specific commit of the library, to avoid breakage due to API changes (see below).
Dub is also supported, with the library being split up into subpackages according to the necessary external dependencies.
See dub.sdl for details.
Overview
The library is split into the following packages:
ae.demo– This package contains a few demos for various parts of the library. Most of these are SDL demos.ae.net– All the networking code (HTTP, NNTP, IRC) lives here.ae.sys– Utility code which primarily interfaces with other systems (including the operating system).ae.ui– Framework for creating 2D games and graphical applications (SDL, OpenGL).ae.utils– Utility code which primarily manipulates data.
Notable sub-packages:
ae.utils.graphics– Contains a templated graphical context optimized for speed, and basic support for a few image formats.
Data
Many modules that handle raw data (from the network / disk) do so using the Data structure, defined in ae.sys.data.
See the module documentation for a description of the type; the quick version is that it is a type equivalent to void[], with a few benefits.
Some modules use an array of Data, to minimize copying / reallocations when handling byte streams with unknown length.
Networking
ae uses asynchronous event-based networking.
A select-based event loop dispatches events to connection objects, which then propagate them to higher-level code as necessary.
libev support is also available.
UI
Not much here yet.
There is a working game demo in ae.demo.pewpew.
Versioning
Currently, there are no stable/development branches, and versioning is done only according to the number of commits in master.
Breaking changes are prefixed with [BREAKING] in the commit message.
Tags are created regularly for the benefit of Dub packages (e.g. Digger).