NostraUtils

A Utility Library for the Nostra Game Engine.

It is a project made by students of the htw saar (https://www.htwsaar.de/) and supervised by Dipl-Inf (FH) Christopher Olbertz.

GitHub: https://github.com/Lehks/NostraUtils

If you do not have the code yet, use the following command to clone the repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/Lehks/NostraUtils.git

or download the ZIP-compressed directly from GitHub using the link above.

Requirements

Nostra Utils was written for the C++17 standard and uses a lot of C++17 features. Officially, C++17 is the minimum required C++ standard. There is however a so-called C++14 compatibility mode, which disables, or modifies, some features in the library to try to enable C++14 support. There are still a lot of C++17 features left (like static_assert without a message, or nested namespace definitions), so it is not guaranteed that the compiler actually supports those features.

Note that backwards compatibility is not guaranteed for the C++14 compatibility mode and it may be removed in the future.

Tests for the C++14 compatibility mode were run and succeeded on:

• GCC
  • Linux
    • Version 7.2.0
    • Version 6.3.1*
• Clang
  • Linux
    • Version 4.0.1 (with a lot of warnings because of the usage of C++1z features)
  • MacOS
    • Version 902.0.39.1 (LLVM Version 9.1.0) (with a lot of warnings because of the usage of C++1z features)

*As of 1.0.1, this test failed

The compatibility mode failed on MSVC entirely.

Building the Project

To build this project, CMake is required. See this (https://cmake.org/install/) link for an explanation on how to install CMake. The minimum required version of CMake is 3.8.2. On Windows, Visual Studio (https://www.visualstudio.com) is also a requirement.

Building the project is done in two steps:

1. Generating platform dependent configuration files (like a Makefile or Visual Studio Solution) using CMake (Chapter Calling CMake).
2. Compiling the code from those configuration files (Chapter Building the Binaries).

Calling CMake

Calling CMake can be done using the terminal or CMake's graphical user interface CMake-GUI.

Terminal

It is assumed, that the command cmake is in the system's PATH variable. Otherwise, the entire path to the CMake executable must be given instead of just cmake.

0. Navigate to the root directory of the source code.
1. mkdir Build Create the directory to build in.
2. cd Build Navigate into the build directory.
3. cmake .. Configure CMake. See note below on how to customize that configuration.
4. cmake --build . --target install Build the project and export the generated files to the default installation path (with is /usr/local on Linux/Unix and C:\Program Files on Windows).

Note: If the build of Nostra Utils should be customized, more parameters need to be passed to CMake (the command from step 3.), but this is generally easier to do with cmake-gui or ccmake (configuring the build with cmake-gui will be explained in a later chapter).

To change the installation directory, the third command needs to be changed to:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/install/directory ..

This will change the install directory to the passed one (/path/to/install/directory in this example).

CMake-GUI

1. Open the CMake GUI (this can be done from the terminal using the command cmake-gui).
2. In the GUI, for the folder that is labeled "Where is the source code:" choose the root directory of the project.
3. For the folder that is labeled "Where to build the binaries:" choose the folder "Build" in the root directory of Nostra Utils.
4. Click the button "Configure". When prompted to choose a generator, the default generator is usually a good choice.
5. After CMake is done configuring, click the button "Generate".

Building the binaries

Note: For the sake of generality, the binaries will only be built from the terminal using CMake commands. Otherwise, the process would be very platform- and generator dependent.

Building the binaries is rather simple and can be done using the command

cmake --build . --target install

Note: It is assumed that the previous command was called from the directory that CMake has build in (which was Build/ in the source's root directory during the examples here).

Note: In the case that building the library succeeds, but the installation fails, try checking whether the process has the rights to write into the installation directory.

Dependencies

This Library uses Catch (https://github.com/catchorg/Catch2) as Unit-Test framework. The source file of Catch (Unittests/Catch/catch.hpp) has not been altered.