Flare README
============

Flare (Free Libre Action Roleplaying Engine) is a simple game engine built to handle a very specific kind of game: single-player 2D action RPGs. Flare is not a reimplementation of an existing game or engine. It is a tribute to and exploration of the action RPG genre.

Rather than building a very abstract, robust game engine, the goal of this project is to build several real games and harvest an engine from the common, reusable code. The first game, in progress, is a fantasy dungeon crawl.

Flare uses simple file formats (INI style config files) for most of the game data, allowing anyone to easily modify game contents. Open formats are preferred (png, ogg). The game code is C++.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
=====================

Most of Flare is Copyright 2011 Clint Bellanger. Contributors retain copyrights to their original contributions.

All of Flare's source code is released under the GNU GPL version 3. Later versions are permitted.

All of Flare's art and data files are released under CC-BY-SA 3.0. Later versions are permitted.

LINKS
=====

Homepage  http://clintbellanger.net/rpg
Source    https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare
Forums    http://opengameart.org/forums/flare
Email     clintbellanger@gmail.com

DEPENDENCIES
============

To build flare you need the 1.2 Development Libraries for SDL, SDL_image, SDL_mixer, and SDL_ttf.

To run flare you need the equivalent 1.2 Runtime Libraries.

http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php

Here's an example of how to install the dependencies for Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-ttf1.2-dev

Additionally, for easy building I recommend using cmake and make.


BUILDING WITH CMAKE
===================

To build flare, go to the main directory/folder and run the following commands:

	make build
	cd build
	cmake ..
	make

If you want the game installed system-wide, as root, install with:

	make install

The game will be installed into '/usr/local' by default.  You can set differet paths in the cmake step, like:

	cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:STRING="/usr" ..

or, BUILDING WITH g++
=====================

If you prefer building directly with C++, the command will be something like this.

Windows plus MinGW (depending on where your SDL dev headers are)
g++ -I C:\MinGW\include\SDL src\*.cpp -o flare.exe -lmingw32 -lSDLmain -lSDL -lSDL_image -lSDL_mixer -lSDL_ttf

Linux (depending on where your SDL includes are)
g++ -I /usr/include/SDL src/*.cpp -o flare -lSDL -lSDL_image -lSDL_mixer -lSDL_ttf


RUNNING FLARE
=============

If the program is installing system-wide (i.e., you typed 'make install' and it worked), you can run it just by executing the 'flare' command.

If you did not perform the installation step, you should copy back the binary in 'build' to the top directory, and run it from there, like this:

	cp flare ..
	cd ..
	./flare

Also, in newer versions, the game can be launched from an icon in your main menu in your GUI environment (KDE, GNOME, etc.).

If you're running flare from your operating system's gui file browser (e.g. Windows Explorer or OSX Finder), you'll want to use one of the provided launchers.  This helps the flare executable use its own working directory, so it can see all those data folders.


SETTINGS
========

Settings are stored in one of these places:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/flare
$HOME/.config/flare
./config

Here you can enable fullscreen, change the game resolution, enable mouse-move, and change keybindings. The settings files are created the first time you run Flare.

SAVE FILES
==========

Save files are stored in one of these places:

$XDG_DATA_HOME/flare
$HOME/.local/share/flare
./saves

If permissions are correct, the game is automatically saved when you exit.