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======
Helium
======

Welcome!  Helium aims to be an open source game engine toolkit to
help provide foundation technology and GUI tools for building game
engines (not games per se).

This project was seeded with code from Nocturnal Initiative, an open
source project at Insomniac Games.  Its continued development is
generously funded by Whitemoon Dreams, Inc.

http://nocturnal.insomniacgames.com/
http://www.insomniacgames.com/
http://www.insomniacgames.com/research_dev/
http://whitemoondreams.com/

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Download
========

Source archive of head revision:
http://github.com/nocturnal/Helium/zipball/master

Git URL (read only):
git://github.com/nocturnal/Helium.git

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Prerequisites
=============

Visual Studio 2008 + SP1 (SP1 is required for regex and compiler fixes)
DirectX SDK (installed to default location)

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Building Helium
===============

First, you'll need to build Dependencies.sln, which should build all
the libraries Helium depends upon.  You must build Dependencies.sln
using the same Project Configuration and Platform as you plan to use
for Helium.  (Eg: Debug / Win32, Release Unicode / x64)

Once you've build Dependencies.sln, you should be able to build
Helium.sln.  Again, make sure your Project Configuration and Platform
setting match up.

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Unicode Support
===============

Unicode is built via solution and project configurations (Debug Unicode
and Release Unicode).  wxWidgets is signalled to compile and link via
wxUSE_UNICODE which is specified in the Unicode.vsprops file.  This
vsprops file is inherited only in Unicode project configurations.

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Platform Agnosticism
====================

We are moving toward a platform-agnostic toolkit from windows-only.  For
the time being we are moving all platform-specific API calls into
Platform.vcproj.

-Geoff (AKA gorlak)
-Andy (AKA andyburke)
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