Author Topic: First steps in game & application development  (Read 4214 times)

Jubatian

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First steps in game & application development
« on: April 23, 2014, 02:08:46 PM »
So you want to give application development a go.

First download and install RRPGE components

Nothing fancy, just read the short tutorial in this topic, taking care to also get (or leave) the assembler in place. Note that the assembler does not need SDL, so on Windows you may freely copy it away alone.

Get the RRPGE specification

Either download it directly from the RRPGE main site (http://www.rrpge.org) or read or check it out from GitHub. Unpack it to some convenient place. It is in plain text, so any plain text editor may be used to read it (such as Notepad++ on Windows, or mcedit on Linux). Alternatively you may browse it directly on GitHub which formats it's reStructuredText nicely.

Check out the assembler's documentation

If you downloaded a binary package, you will find it as README.rrpgeasm. It is just a short documentation describing the assembler's capabilities apart from recognizing and translating opcodes. For the processor's instruction set, you should use the specification mentioned above.

If you want to start without configuring stuff on your system, just copy the rrpgeasm binary in the root of your RRPGE application project, set up a main.asm file to become your project's main, then starting the assembler will just compile it right there.

Check some RRPGE examples for start

You can check out the sources of the RRPGE examples from GitHub. Check how the main files of those are formatted, experiment with them to see how the system reacts to your coding. Note that the assembler should always be ran from command line so it can report back compilation warnings and errors. When it does so, it pinpoints the exact location of the problem in your source, so it should not be hard to fix those.

Important!

RRPGE is undergoing large changes right now, nearing finalization. If you are really interested in developing for the system, don't use the binaries on the main site, rather check out the current state from GitHub. It already works, however it is still largely untested, and lacks many examples. Once these holes are somewhat filled in, it will be packaged and published on the main site for a more convenient start. For some information on the planned stability of this new iteration, check out this topic.
« Last Edit: October 28, 2014, 08:20:08 PM by Jubatian »