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Contributions

We discuss all features, fixes etc. to be contributed on Discord.

Discussing Gamedesign

Discussions regarding game design are held in the ltheory-crafting channel:

Open on:

Discussing Gamesystems

Discussions regarding game systems / programming are held in the programming-discussion channel:

Open on:

Documentation

It´s highly recommended you document what you are doing in code. For more generalized documentation & design we use a seperately hosted Wiki.js Instance. For wiki editoral access contact @IllustrisJack directly or a maintainer. A backup repository of the wiki exists here.

Getting Started

In this file we´ll go over the whole process of getting started & the the workflow of Limit Theory Redux development.

Prerequisites

To build Limit Theory, you'll need a few standard developer tools. All of them are available to download for free.

Windows

To work on any of the Lua scripts, the following tools are required:

You may want to install a GUI for Git, such as GitHub for Desktop: https://desktop.github.com/

Optional dependencies

Optionally, if you would like to made changes to the libphx engine, you will also need:

Everything other than Visual Studio can be installed using winget if you're on Windows 10 1709 or later:

  • winget install LLVM.LLVM Rustlang.Rustup

macOS

Users on macOS will need to install Git, Xcode, Rust and LLVM.

First, install Xcode using the Mac App store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xcode/id497799835

To install the remaining dependencies, we recommend first installing the Homebrew package manager if you haven't already: https://brew.sh/

Once Homebrew is installed, open a Terminal window and run the following one-liner:

  • brew install git rust llvm

Linux

You should install Git, Cargo, Rust and LLVM using your distro's package manager. OpenGL, GLU and ALSA development libraries are also required.

For example, if using Ubuntu 22.04, open a terminal and install the following packages:

  • sudo apt install -y git build-essential libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libasound2-dev cargo llvm-dev

Setting up

With the above prerequisites installed, let's get the libphx engine set up and ready to run a Lua application. First, open a terminal window (Git Bash on Windows).

Check out the Repository

Use cd to change directories to the place where you want to download LTR.

  • cd <path where you want to put the LTR source> (for example: ~/Desktop for the desktop)

Now, you can download the repository:

  • git clone https://github.com/Limit-Theory-Redux/ltheory.git

Set up libphx

Next, we will need to get the engine ready to run Lua applications. There are two options, downloading a precompiled binary package, or compiling libphx manually.

Option 1: Using precompiled binaries

  1. Download the latest binary release by going to the latest release on GitHub, and downloading the right dev-binaries package for your platform: https://github.com/Limit-Theory-Redux/ltheory/releases/tag/latest
  2. Navigate to the directory of the checked-out repository (e.g. ~/Desktop/ltheory if you cloned to the desktop).
  3. Create a new folder named bin if it does not exist already.
  4. Extract the contents of the zip file downloaded in step 1 into bin. The bin directory should now contain a number of libraries and executable files, including ltr.

Once you've completed these steps, you can skip straight to Running a Lua App

Option 2: Compiling libphx manually

As mentioned in Prerequisites, the additional optional dependencies are required to compile libphx manually.

Limit Theory Redux is a Rust application, and therefore utilises the cargo toolchain for building. We also have a helper script build.sh written in Bash to do some of the heavy lifting. If you're on Windows, you'll need to use the Git Bash terminal (included when installing Git itself), it likely won't work from cmd.exe.

From a terminal in the directory of the checked-out repository, run:

  • ./build.sh

This will build the engine code and place it in the bin directory. build.sh is a helper script that does two things: runs cargo build then copies the binaries out of the target directory into bin. You can also run ./build.sh with the --debug flag to disable optimizations and incorporate debug symbols, and --run-tests to run unit tests.

Running a Lua App

If the compilation is successful, you now have bin/ltr (or bin/ltr.exe on Windows), which is the main executable. This program launches a Lua script. The intention is for Limit Theory (and all mods) to be broken into many Lua scripts, which would then implement the gameplay, using script functions exposed by the underlying engine.

To launch the default script ('LTheoryRedux'), you can run the launcher directly from a terminal / command prompt:

  • Windows: ./bin/ltr.exe
  • macOS/Linux: ./bin/ltr

To launch a specific script, add its name to the end:

  • Windows: ./bin/ltr.exe <script name without extension> (i.e. ./bin/ltr.exe PhysicsTest)
  • macOS/Linux: ./bin/ltr <script name without extension> (i.e. ./bin/ltr PhysicsTest)

All top-level scripts are in the script/States/App directory.

Quickly iterate on engine changes

As we use the cargo ecosystem, if you're iterating on engine code, it might be easier to simply run:

  • cargo run

This will essentially run cargo build && ./target/debug/ltr in one step. You can pass --release to cargo run to enable optimizations. If you'd like to launch with a specific script, you can pass it as an argument to cargo run:

  • cargo run -- <script name without extension>