Admirals

Game engine focused on 2D (grid-based), real-time strategy (RTS), multiplayer games.

Installation and Building

Prerequisites

Vulkan, SDL2, CMake, build system (like make or ninja) and a C++ and C (with support for C99) compiler.

Additional tools/libraries that are used by this project are: clang-format (code formatting), clang-tidy (linting), valgrind with callgrind (profiling) and CPPUnit.

Cloning

Start by cloning this repository and downloading all the submodules using:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/joelsiks/admirals.git

You are also able to download/update submodules using:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Due to bad practice (and platform in-portability), the author(s) of Vulkan2D have named the include paths for SDL2 in Linux fashion, resulting in Windows developers not being able to include SDL using the correct paths. To fix this, run the following command which replaces the bad include paths with the correct format.

find include/Vulkan2D/VK2D -type f -exec sed -i 's/<SDL2\//</g' {} +

Building on Windows (using MSYS2)

Download and install the latest Vulkan SDK here and make sure that the VULKAN_SDK environment variable points to the correct installation path.

Download the latest development package of SDL2, named SDL2-devel-<version>-VC.zip, from here and extract it to the include/ directory of the project and rename it to SDL2.

Download Git Bash or MSYS2 and execute the following commands to install needed build tools (we suggest using the Universal C Runtime (ucrt)):

pacman -S --needed base-devel mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-toolchain mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-ninja mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-cmake mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-cppunit

You can then move on to creating build files:

cmake -S . -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER:FILEPATH=C:/msys64/ucrt64/bin/gcc.exe -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=C:/msys64/ucrt64/bin/g++.exe

Building on Linux

Although the game engine mainly supports Windows and likely works best there, the engine can be built on Linux due to the portability of the project's dependencies.

You will need to meet the prerequisites listed here. Otherwise, the instructions are very similar to those listed for Windows.

Styling

Formatting

This project uses clang-format to format source code, with a config file called .clang-format in the project root. clang-format is part of the clang suite, which can be downloaded using the following commands:

# MSYS2
pacman -S --needed mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-clang

# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install clang-format

Run the following command to format a single source file:

clang-format --style=file -i <source_file>

To format all files in the src/ directory, run:

find src -name '*.cpp' -o -name '*.hpp' | xargs clang-format --style=file -i

Additionally, if using Visual Studio Code, you can download the C/C++ extension, set the default formatter (Ctrl+Shift+P -> Format Document With..) to C/C++ and enable format on save to format while writing code.

Linting

We use clang-tidy for linting and code consistency. clang-tidy is also part of the clang suite but can be downloaded individually using the following commands:

# MSYS2
pacman -S --needed mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-clang-tools-extra

# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install clang-tidy

Running/using clang-tidy might be different depending on the development environment you are using. There is always the option of running it from the command-line (preferably using run-clang-tidy).

For Visual Studio Code users, there is a settings template in .vscode-template/settings.json that includes the most important configuration for automatically running clang-tidy on file save, given that you have the C/C++ extension installed. Either move .vscode-template/settings.json into .vsode/settings.json or copy the contents into your existing .vscode/settings.json.

Unit Tests

We use CppUnit for unit testing. It can be installed using the following commands:

# MSYS2
pacman -S --needed mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-cppunit

# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install libcppunit-dev

Profiling

The engine (specifically the test programs located in src/test) are easiest to profile on Linux using callgrind (part of the valgrind tool) to manually interpret using kcachegrind. You can install valgrind and kcachegrind using the following command:

# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install valgrind kcachegrind

Instructions

To get results from callgrind that are (reasonably) good, it is preferred to link the Admirals engine statically in the CMakeLists.txt file. This is done by changing the follow line:

# From
add_library(engine SHARED ${SOURCES})
# To
add_library(engine STATIC ${SOURCES})

Also, to get information about the source code in the profiling results, add the following line to the top of the CMakeLists.txt file. This line adds debug info to the release build type, which is desirable since we also want to profile any optimizations that occur, which isn't the case for the debug build type.

set(CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE RelWithDebInfo)

Running profiler

# Navigate into the build/ directory with build files.
ninja ui_test # or some other executable
valgrind --tool=callgrind ./ui_test
kcachegrind callgrind.out.<pid>

Authors

Joel Sikström, Jakob Wallén, Casper Norrbin, Oskar Gådin