= Rubygame README

== What is Rubygame?

Rubygame is a cross-platform game-development extension and library for Ruby,
inspired by Pygame. The purpose of Rubygame is to empower game developers by
providing them with powerful and flexible high-level concepts. Instead of
worrying about low-level technical details, you can focus your energy on
more interesting things (like making a fun game).

Rubygame's core is written in C to bind low-level SDL functions into Ruby.
On top of that is a pure Ruby library for higher-level behavior like
event and game object management.

=== Relevant Links
1. Rubygame: http://rubygame.sourceforge.net
2. Ruby: http://www.ruby-lang.org
3. Pygame: http://www.pygame.org
4. SDL: http://www.libsdl.org

== Requirements

You will definitely need these software packages to compile Rubygame:

* ruby        >= 1.8 
* SDL         >= 1.2.7
* rake        >= 0.7.0    (for build/install system)

It's highly recommended that you have these packages as well, or some
cool features won't be available!

* SDL_gfx     >= 2.0.10
* SDL_image   >= 1.2.3
* SDL_mixer   >= 1.2.7
* SDL_ttf     >= 2.0.6

(If you don't have some of those, you have to disable those features
by passing some flags to the build process. See "Advanced Install", below.)

If you are compiling source on a binary-based Linux ditribution,
you will also need the "dev" packages of ruby, SDL, SDL_gfx, SDL_image,
SDL_mixer, and SDL_ttf. (Really, you just need the header files.)

And of course, if you are compiling the source, you will need a C compiler!
These versions of gcc worked fine when I tried them; other compilers might
work too:

* gcc 3.3, 3.4, 4.0, 4.1

== Install

=== Basic Install

Extract the archive and enter its top directory.
Then run ($ indicates as user, # as root):

 $ rake build
 # rake install

=== Advanced Install

The build and install tasks can be configured by providing certain commands
to rake:

no-sdl-gfx::    do not build modules which depend on SDL_gfx
no-sdl-image::  do not build modules which depend on SDL_image
no-sdl-mixer::  do not build modules which depend on SDL_mixer
no-sdl-ttf::    do not build modules which depend on SDL_ttf
no-opengl::     do not build modules which depend on OpenGL

no-sdl-config:: do not guess compiler/linker flags using `sdl-config'

debug::         build modules with debbugging flags enabled
universal::     on MacOS X, try to compile for both PPC and Intel
verbose::       display the build commands as they are run

Additionally, the build process respects certain environmental variables.
In particular, CFLAGS and LDFLAGS are important for users compiling with
the no-sdl-config command.

CC::            C compiler command
CFLAGS::        flags passed to the C compiler
LDSHARED::      linker command
LDFLAGS::       flags passed to the linker
RUBYARCHDIR::   where to install platform-specific compiled extensions
RUBYLIBDIR::    where to install platform-independent interpreted libs

IMPORTANT: if you are missing any optional SDL_* libraries, you must specify
"no-*" flags for those libraries. For example, if you don't have SDL_gfx:

 $ rake no-sdl-gfx build

If you don't disable the features, the compile will probably fail when it
looks for the headers and libraries. (The build system is not smart enough to
automatically disable missing features.)

=== Generating documentation

You can generate documentation for Rubygame's API by running:

 # rake rdoc

Documentation will be generated as HTML in the 'html' directory.
Open 'html/index.html' in a web browser to get started.

== Usage

See the documentation (online at http://rubygame.sourceforge.net, or
generated locally with the 'rake rdoc' command). 

We also recommend that you take a peek at the demo applications in
the 'samples' directory, especially chimp.rb.

== License

Rubygame is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser GPL.
See LICENSE for more details.

Some of the sample files are distributed under licenses other than the
GNU Lesser GPL. See 'samples/README' and 'samples/GPL' for more details.

John Croisant (jacius at users.sourceforge.net)