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++ and is released under the GPL v3; the game art is CC-BY-SA 3.0.

LINKS
=====

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

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

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

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


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

To build flare, go to the build folder (cd build) and run the following commands:

cmake .
make

Once you're done, return to this folder and you'll see the flare executable.


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

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


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

Running flare from command line is straightforward in Linux:
./flare

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.


FULLSCREEN
==========

If flare works in windowed mode, it should be safe to run fullscreen.  To run flare in fullscreen mode, edit config/settings.txt and set
fullscreen=1

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

Make sure you have read and write access to the "saves" folder.  Currently the game is automatically saved when you exit.