Easy2D Documentation

What is Easy2D ?

Easy2D is an object oriented game library that makes possible writing 2D tile-based games with speed and ease. It encapsulates lots of common tasks found in these games, such as: tile maps, animated sprites, bitmap fonts, etc., and is written in C++ using SDL for input and rendering, and Audiere for audio.

Features

As of version 0.0.9 (alpha) it offers some cool features:

Sprite and animation controller
Tile maps
Images of several formats*
True Type (*.ttf and *.fon) fonts
Bitmap Fonts
Music and SFX playback, with group volume control
Keyboard and Mouse event callback
Resource manager (for memory optimization)
A nice flow control, by the use of methods OnInit, OnRun and OnQuit
A built-in game loop (inside method OnRun)
Exception handling
... and a lot of effort to bring up some other features ! ;)

* Currently Easy2D supports the same image file formats supported by SDL_image, which are: BMP, PNM (PPM/PGM/PBM), XPM, LBM, PCX, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TGA, and TIFF formats.

What does it use ?

Easy2D makes use of other libraries, listed below:

SDL 1.2.14 (www.libsdl.org) under LGPL
SDL_image 1.2.10 (www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image) under LGPL
SDL_ttf 2.0.9 (www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf) - (optional*) under LGPL
Audiere 1.9.4 (audiere.sourceforge.net) under LGPL
RapidXml 1.13 (rapidxml.sourceforge.net) under MIT License
zlib 1.2.3 (www.zlib.net) under zlib License

And also has support for tile maps made with Tiled, and for Bitmap Fonts created with F2IBuilder

Tiled (www.mapeditor.org)
F2IBuilder (f2ibuilder.sourceforge.net)

* Easy2D does not use SDL_ttf by default, see the Makefile for details.

License

Easy2D is released under the zlib License. This license is very simple and very permissive, go to the LICENSE file on the root of the distribution for its complete text. Just remember that Easy2D uses other libraries, and they have their own licenses that must be respected.

Getting Started

To get started with Easy2D, check out the Tutorials section. Don't forget to compile the library: check out the Makefile located at the root of the distribution.

Troubleshooting and Support

Please, unless you are interested in helping with development of Easy2D, don't mail me if you can't run or install it, because this is still an alpha version, and it may contain several bugs and problems. Please be patient until it goes Beta, or use it at your own risk! ;)

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to:

Eduardo Nunes Pereira: for testing and improvement suggestions;
Joao Roberto Sampaio: for testing and improvement suggestions;
Oskari Timperi: for contributing with the project sending his modifications on the code;
Rodrigo Delduca: for fixing the window icon bug;
Selma Shimono (my wife): for C/C++ consulting and for not dumping me out because of this project;
W. C. Bubel: for the algorithm that decompresses Tiled gzipped map data using zlib.