APE-2D (or APE) is an experimental 2D game engine built on C++17. Its founding principle is to use a data-oriented approach through its use of the entity-component-system (ECS) architecture. In practice this works in the following manner:
- Entities represent game objects and are simple integer IDs
- Components are classes which contain data and optionally some relevant methods
- Components can be added to entities to allow any type of game entity to be built
- Systems operate on all entities with certain components. For example, a rendering system may take all entities with a sprite and a position component and render them.
This system allows for far greater flexibility and control when compared to a traditional OOP approach in which game entities are classes with properties, and where large inheritance trees can create confusion.
Ensure that you have meson installed, as well as the SDL2 and SDL2_image dependencies. Then, run:
meson setup build
cd build
ninja
ninja install
The engine is currently being rewritten with an SDL2 based renderer and a more advanced input and scene system.