"A witty saying proves nothing." -- Voltaire

About this document

Note: This document is a draft! Many of Dadren's features may change or be removed entirely! This manual is constantly evolving until the 1.0 release and is not considered the final specification.

Module-level Documentation

Automatically generated module-level documentation can be found here.

Overview

Dadren is a 2D game library for Nim.

Some of its features are:

• A resource-oriented application framework for all your boilerplate needs
• Your typical 2D game facilities like Sprites, Tilemaps and so on
• A data-driven entity component system for modeling rich game objects

Application Framework

The App is a central type in Dadren and orchestrates a number of concerns on behalf of the game:

• Creating and managing the window
• Pumping keyboard and other events
• Loading settings and resources
• Operating the main loop

Application Settings

The App is initialized with a JSON-formatted settings file which contains all the required startup information such as window resolution and the location of Resource Packs.

Resource Packs are also JSON-formatted files. They consist mostly of some meta-data about the Resource Pack itself and also the filenames of actual resources. Once loaded, the App makes the various resources available to game code through associated Resource Managers.

Resource Management

Dadren features the management of various resource asset types such as textures, fonts and sounds. For each resource type Dadren will load a configured Resource Pack. This Resouce Pack tells Dadren where all of the actual resource assets are located. Typically, each asset will have an associated name that can be used by game code to later request the resource.

Scene Management

The App controls the main loop of the game but will call functions on the current Scene object each frame. This allows the game code to respond to system events, update game state or render.

By changing the active Scene the game can implement different screens like splash screens, main menus and highscore lists.

Entities and Components

Dadren features a rich entity component system that allows you to create lots of different kinds of objects for your game. By defining and reusing small patterns of data you can avoid designing yourself into a corner. These component combinations can be stored in JSON files allowing the design of your game objects by tools and non-technical users like designers. Components can be combined at run-time to create new entity types on the fly!

Installation

The latest stable version of Dadren can be obtained with Nimble with the following:

nimble install dadren

To install the current development version install the devel branch:

nimble install dadren#devel

If you'd like to work on Dadren or inspect the implemenetation you can clone the source code:

git clone https://github.com/dadren/dadren.git

Running the Examples

If you cloned the source repository, it comes with a number of examples. To run them simply execute nim run from inside the example directory of your choice:

$ cd dadren/examples/boilerplate $ nim run