24 October 2009
Welcome to IndieZen

Zen Engine Tutorials Base Starter Kit 101

This tutorial shows you how to create a game client using the Base Starter Kit. This game client does little more than initialize a few game engine components and display a blank screen.

The only additional thing this game client does is to bind the “Q” key to the “Quit” action, which allows you to quit the game by pressing the “Q” key.

The Base starter kit is a game engine starter kit that is used to simplify the use of Zen Engine. It contains code in support of behaviors, game objects, game groups and scriptable actions. It also contains the primary “game loop”.

Note: This tutorial is being updated for 0.5.5 and does not match what you see for the 0.5.0 or prior releases.
Getting Started

The first tutorial is located at Zen/tutorials/Tutorial1/Tutorial1.sln. I’ll explain how I created this solution later. For now, lets just break it down.

There are many projects in this solution, but don’t freak out.

Most of these projects are libraries that you will be using to create your games, but you’re not expected to have to understand how they work, nor should you need to modify any of the code.

The only library that you really have to mess with is:

* GameClient – Client library for this game.
* GameCommon – Common library for this game that contains code used by both the client and the server.

Normally when you’re creating a game, you would use your own names instead of “Game”. (Who calls their game “Game” anyway?) For instance, my game Gunships by Sarge I named them GunshipsClient, GunshipsCommon, and GunshipsServer. This tutorial only deals with a non-networked “game” (if you can call it that), otherwise you would also have a GameClient, GameCommon and GameServer library as I did with Gunships by Sarge.

Take a minute and browse through the GameClient project.

The other projects:

* BaseClient – Client helper library for the Base Starter Kit.
* BaseCommon – Common helper library for the Base Starter Kit.
* ZenEngine – Zen Engine framework
* !ZOgre – OGRE rendering and resource manager plugin.
* !ZLua – Lua scripting plugin.

These other projects, although you are welcome to browse throuh them, you most likely will not need to use them. — read more –

For more news please visit the IndieZen Wiki

Where Are We Today?

Milestone: Version 0.6.1
Due 11/01/09

This minor milestone is to push through the World Builder to visibility.

Zen Studio

  • Implement a Property view with contributors
  • World Builder
    • Enhance the Scene framework as needed.
    • Create the Layers view.
    • Enhance the Creator view.
  • Game Builder
    • Add element properties

Milestone: Version 0.6.2
Due 11/29/09

This short milestone is primarily for minor enhancements and bug fixes to World Builder and Game Builder.

Milestone: Version 0.7.0
Due 05/01/10

The primary goals of this milestone are:

  • Zen Worlds
    • Zone services
    • Zone Data services
    • World services
    • Multiplayer networking
  • Game Builder
    • Integration with Zen Worlds
    • World export (not sure how this will look yet)
      • Database – export to a database including DML to create the database
      • Lua script – export to Lua script
      • C++ and script bindings – Code generator for C++ and script bindings for game object types.
    • World Builder
      • Integration with Zen Worlds

    Milestone: Version 1.0.0
    Due (09/13/10)

    Version 1.0 first GA release.

    The primary goal of this milestone is to polish the documentation and tutorials, clean up the installation process and polish any interfaces that require polishing.

    Timeline
    Here you can find the change logs for all the newly baked code bits and bytes. (Step 1: Open Eyes. Step 2: Focus on screen…)

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