This is an old personal project that once used ncurses to make games with ASCII art. It had a basic game loop with Z-indexing and even animation! Alas, it was poorly written and buggy.
I'm currently rewriting it to use OpenGL and FreeType. It's an attempt to teach myself about basic game engine architecture.
At some point in the future I want to re-add ncurses support and make it possible to use that instead of OpenGL. The way I've got it set up it should be easy to do either.
I'd also like to integrate it with Lua.
Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/GeekWithALife/TextEngine.git
You will need to install the following to be able to configure/compile this project.
You will need to add the MinGW bin folder path to the start of your System Environment Path variable before any command-line compiling can take place. Tutorial Link
Your resulting Path variable should look like <path_to_mingw_install>\bin;<ORIGINAL_PATH_VARIABLES>
Note: You cannot build anything as described in this tutorial from the Git Bash terminal or the MinGW MSYS terminal. It will break. This is because when CMake is told to build using MinGW, it runs an internal script to find the path of the toolchain, which includes a path to sh.exe. Git Bash and MSYS are using their own sh.exe. CMake will recognize this conflict and print an error message.
First make a folder somewhere on your system that your compiler will be able to access to store downloaded libraries. On my system, it's D:/Env/Libraries/.
Download the following libraries, and extract each of them to the directory you just created. The extracted library folders should contain folders like src, lib, and maybe a CMakeLists.txt file.
FreeType and GLEW will need to be built using MinGW in order for linking to work properly.
To do this, copy the build_glew.bat and build_freetype.bat files to their respective installation directories (ex: copy build_glew.bat to <your_library_folder>/glew-<version#>).
Now run each of those batch files. You can do this by simply double clicking on them.
You will also need to move the relevant binaries to the directory where the final executable ends up. In this case, move them to the folder that this repo was cloned to.
FreeGLUT's binary will be <freeglut_install_folder>/bin/freeglut.dll
GLEW's binary will be <glew_install_folder>/lib/glew32.dll
FreeType's binary is a static library, and will not need to be copied.
Finally, you will then need to edit Windows.cmake such that the folder names match the ones on your computer.
Open the file and follow the instructions in the comments.
sudo apt-get install cmake &&
sudo apt-get install libfreetype6 &&
sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev &&
sudo apt-get install libxmu-dev &&
sudo apt-get install libxi-dev &&
sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev &&
sudo apt-get install libglew-devThis project comes with a default main.cpp file. You may edit this, or make a new file and add it to the build list in the BuildList.cmake file.
If for some reason you need to start over at any point in the process, it is highly advisable you run cleanup.sh beforehand. This file should be runnable on Windows if your path environment variable is set correctly.
Open the repository folder in the Windows command prompt by holding Shift and right-clicking in/on the folder and selecting "Open command window here".
Run CMake: cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" .
If there are no errors, congrats! You installed everything in the right places.
Make the project: mingw32-make
And that's that!
Alternatively, you may simply run the rebuild.bat file if you're okay with it rebuilding from the ground up.
Open the repository folder in terminal.
Run CMake: cmake .
Make the project: make
And you're done. Isn't Linux nice?