VUEngine

VUEngine goes modular with components library

Added 2018-07-03 06:37:43 +0000 UTC

After the VUEngine preprocessor, we are happy to announce that we have finished work on another major new feature of the upcoming VUEngine version 6, making a big step towards a more modular architecture. VUEngine Components is a library of reuseable, prefab components like entities, states or fonts, that can be easily included in your VUEngine project for a good headstart and/or to add new functionality.

For example, the library covers all the basic needs of a Virtual Boy game, like an automatic pause feature, a blinking low battery indicator, various splash screens or even a save data manager to work with Save RAM, so you can focus on writing the actual game. Furthermore, the library should eventually offer a broad selection of ready for use fonts, effects and special entities.

Components list

Here's a list of all the components we have added so far. More will likely be added before the initial release, and we plan to constantly expand the list with new goodness.

Entities

ReflectiveEntity

Fonts

VirtualBoyFont

Other

AutomaticPause
LowBatteryIndicator
SaveDataManager

States

SplashScreens

Usage

Simply add the FQN (fully qualified names) of the desired components to the COMPONENTS variable in your project's config.make file to include them. Rebuild the project.

# VUEngine based components that the project uses
COMPONENTS = vuengine-components/entities/ReflectiveEntity \
vuengine-components/other/AutomaticPause \
vuengine-components/other/LowBatteryIndicator \
vuengine-components/other/SaveDataManager \
vuengine-components/states/SplashScreens \

Check out the individual components' readme files for information about additional steps to be taken and configuration possibilities. Usually, you need to do a quick setup of the components in your game's main loop, before calling Game::start().

You can also create your own components and place them in VBDE's libs folder to share your custom code between multiple VUEngine projects.

Roadmap

The VUEngine Components library will be available with the next release of VBDE. Don't expect anything in the very near future, though, since another major new feature we plan to implement before release is a communication class to allow for multiplayer games via link cable, which proves to be quite the challenge to do right.

Of course you don't have to wait for an official release - just grab the latest code right from the git repositories. Our demos have already been ported to make use of the components library. Be sure to check out the Barebone Demo for a great example of a minimal project building upon various components.