Easy2D Documentation

What is Easy2D ?

Easy2D is an object oriented game engine 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.

Features

As of version 0.0.8 (alpha) it offers some cool features:

Sprite and animation controller
Loading and Blitting of orthogonal tile maps
Loading and blitting of images of several formats*
Loading and blitting of True Type (*.ttf and *.fon) fonts
Loading and blitting of Bitmap Fonts
Resource manager (for memory optimization)
Music playback
A nice flow control, by the use of methods OnInit, OnRun and OnQuit
A built-in game loop (inside method OnRun)
Keyboard and Mouse event callback functions
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 1.2.13 (www.libsdl.org)
SDL_image 1.2.6 (www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_image)
SDL_mixer 1.2.8 (www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer)
SDL_ttf 2.0.9 (www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_ttf) - (optional*)
RapidXml 1.11 (rapidxml.sourceforge.net)
zlib 1.2.3 (www.zlib.net)

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 LGPL (Gnu Lesser General Public License), see LGPL.txt for more details.

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.