Initialization

Before you touch any of this, read the introduction. It explains why you probably shouldn't be here in the first place.

If you're still going, then here's everything you need to get the engine compiling.

What you'll need

• Haxe, more specifically the exact version the engine asks for, which right now is 4.3.7. DO NOT grab the latest version of Haxe just because it's newer.

• Git. Get git-scm and leave the installer options at it's default.

• A C++ compiler. hxcpp turns your Haxe into native code, and that needs a compiler.

  • On Windows, that's Visual Studio Build Tools 2019 or newer, and in the Individual Components tab, you want the MSVC v143 C++ x64/x86 build tools plus the Windows SDK. It's roughly ~1GB to download and ~5.5GB installed. On Linux, you want g++ and gcc, plus libvlc for video support. On MacOS, you want Xcode.

• The engine's libraries. Run setup-windows.bat on Windows, or setup-unix.sh on Linux and MacOS. Both are in the building/ folder. Let it finish completely. Important: don't run haxelib upgrade afterwards. The engine uses its own forks of Lime, OpenFL, Flixel and hscript, and upgrading swaps them for the normal versions. Things then break in ways that are very annoying to track down.

• An editor. Of course, this is optional, but recommended. VS Code with the Haxe and Lime extensions is what most people use. Set up the hxcpp debugger early on. You also need to actually know some things. Haxe as a language, how HaxeFlixel works, states, cameras, sprites, signals. What OpenFL is doing underneath all that, ect.

The first build is 10 to 40 minutes depending on your specs. Rebuilds after that are anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes. The whole setup will eat around 10GB once the caches pile up, and every extra platform you support is another full build and another round of testing.

Getting set up

Fork the repo on GitHub, then clone your fork.

Run the setup script for your platform and wait for the libraries to install.

Now build the completely untouched engine:

haxelib run lime test windows

Swap windows for linux or mac depending on what you're on. Running haxelib run lime setup once makes the lime command global, so from then on you can just type lime test windows.

If it runs fine, you know your tools work. After that, make a branch and start editing.

Useful commands

The engine has helper scripts in building/. Run ./cne-windows.bat -help or ./cne-unix.sh -help to see what they can do.

./cne-windows.bat test builds the game using the source assets/ folder instead of the exported one, which is a lot nicer while you're actually developing. lime test still works normally if you'd rather use that.