Simple* Suite: Quickstart "Guide"

A Simply-Interfaced 3D-Game Support Suite by Steaphan Greene for SDL/OpenGL for Simple*

Preparing to write code for/with Simple*

To get started with Simple*, first, get download the SVN repository to your compiling system, using Subversion. Details on doing that are here.

To compile Simple* you will need:

• A standard C/C++ compiler (GCC recommended)
• GNU Make (or you will have to build your own "project")
• Any sh-compliant shell (GNU Bash recommended, or you will have to manually do the work of all the scripts)

Before you compile Simple*, you will need all of its dependencies. Be sure you have all the development files for each of these (and each of their dependencies) for whatever build environment you are using. Here's a list:

• SDL
• SDL_image
• SDL_mixer
• SDL_net
• SDL_ttf
• OpenGL (GL and GLU)
• zziplib (Temporary, I will be removing this dependency)

If you are running debian, the following command should take care of all of the above (both the requirements and the dependencies):

• apt-get -fy install libsdl1.2debian-alsa libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libsdl-net1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libzzip-dev g++ make

Next, you will need to compile it. If you have all the recommended tools above, it is just a matter of running "make" in the "simple" directory ("folder"). Then, if that worked, installing it with one of the following:

• make install - Will install into /usr/local (the default)
• make PREFIX=$HOME install - Will install into your home directory (use if you don't have root permissions or don't want to install system-wide)
• make PREFIX=<otherdir> install - Will install into directories under the <otherdir> directory

No matter which you chose, you will need to be sure to have the bin subdirectory (eg: "/usr/local/bin", "~/bin", or "<otherdir>/bin", for the three install examples above) in your path. To test if that works, run this:

• simple-config --version

You should see something like this printed to the screen:

0.0.0-svn0000000832

Then work on your app that will use it, or check out an app that already uses it, such as LDO.

At this point, you will certainly want to keep up with updates to Simple*. The best way to do this is to join the Simple* mailing list, or at least read through its archives every now and then. No reason not to join, it is an extremely low-volume list, as you can see by the archives

Writing code for/with Simple*

Hello world in Simple* coming soon.

For a complete example of using Simple*, check out LDO

Other examples coming soon.