Classic Blades of Exile

This project hosts the source code to the classic RPG creator Blades of Exile after it was released by Spiderweb Software under GPLv2. It is a svn-git transfer from the Google Code Project; all issues and trunk code has been ported.

The primary purpose of this project is to provide bug fixes to Blades of Exile so that it can compile and run on modern operating systems. The secondary purpose is to generalize and extend its functionality while maintaining backwards compatibility.

Contributions are accepted primarily via pull request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for more guidelines.

Before Building

The most common error when building Open Blades of Exile is to try building without initializing the submodules first. When you are obtaining the source code, don't download the zip file directly from GitHub. The best way to get started is: git clone --recursive https://github.com/calref/cboe (replacing the URL with your fork's address if you forked the repo to make contributions).

If you already cloned this repo without the --recursive flag, use this command: git submodule update --init. This will also fix the problem.

Building

There are currently three ways to build Blades of Exile:

• XCode 4 or later
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2013/2017
• scons

The officially supported method is scons. It's set up to work on any platform with any toolset, but only the following have been tested:

• Mac with Xcode tools
• Windows with Microsoft Cl
• Linux with clang or gcc

The script is currently a work-in-progress and as such may be a little fragile, but we're working on that. With luck, just running scons will simply do the right thing and build a working executable under build/Blades of Exile. If not, though, you may have to adjust a few things.

You can pass the following parameters to scons:

• OS=windows|darwin - Override platform auto-detection (only partially implemented)
• LIBPATH=pathlist - Specify where to look for non-system dynamic libraries to link against.
• FRAMEWORKPATH=pathlist (Mac only) - Specify where to look for non-system frameworks.
• INCLUDEPATH=pathlist - Specify where to look for non-system header files.

If you can't get that to work, you can copy the required dependencies into deps/lib (for dynamic libraries and frameworks) or deps/include (for headers). That means that deps/include would have two subfolders boost/ and SFML/.

Some dependencies are supplied automatically as submodules. You can obtain them by cloning the repository with git clone --recursive or by calling git submodule update --init after making your clone. (This notice is repeated because it is the MOST COMMON problem when building Open Blades of Exile.)

The following dependencies are required:

• SFML - all components except sfml-net.
• Boost - Filesystem and System, plus several header-only libraries; if you're picky, you can run scons and see it enumerate exactly which libraries are needed
• ZLib - This is included with the system on the Mac.

For Linux builds, the following additional dependencies are required:

• TGUI - version 0.9, built with C++14 as shown here
  • or, if cmake is available when you call scons, TGUI will be built from source automatically
• zenity command-line tools

If you are using the Visual Studio toolset, we recommend installing vcpkg to manage these dependencies.

Use the following command to install the required dependencies. Note: You must call it from one of the Visual Studio project directories, cboe/proj/vs2013 or cboe/proj/vs2017.

For 32-bit builds:

vcpkg install --triplet=x86-windows

For 64-bit builds:

vcpkg install --triplet=x64-windows

If this is the first time installing packages with vcpkg since install you will need to run the integrate command:

vcpkg integrate install

If you're using XCode, you may need to adjust the project file settings to specify the correct place to search. For example, if you installed Boost via Homebrew, you may need to add something like the following to the Project Build Settings, under Linking->Other Linking Flags:

-lboost_filesystem -lboost_system -L/usr/local/Cellar/boost/1.57.0/lib

Again with Homebrew, you may also need to add the following to Apple LLVM Custom Compiler Flags -> Other C++ Flags:

-isystem/usr/local/Cellar/boost/1.57.0/include

Notes and oddities:

• The XCode build uses SFML frameworks, while the scons build on the Mac uses SFML dynamic libraries.
• On Windows, scons assumes that Boost is statically linked and thus does not copy the dlls into the program directory. However, on the Mac, scons links dynamically with Boost.

Contributing

If you want to contribute code to the project, please open a pull request. Be sure to read the style guide before coding.

This project targets the subset of C++11 supported by both Xcode 4 and Visual Studio 2013. That means that generally you can use C++11, but the following features (at least) are not permitted:

• Ref-qualifiers
• Attributes
• Inheriting constructors (via using)
• Unicode string literals
• User-defined literals

Helpful Links

• BoE Forum at Spiderweb Software
• Official IRC channel (or join #openboe on irc.libera.chat)
• Original Game Source - Where it all began. Warning: Terrifying code.
• Experimental Windows/Mac Builds - will be put up whenever Celtic Minstrel feels like it.
• Official Web Site - The hub for all things OpenBoE. The documentation is also in viewable format, and there is an archive of all known scenarios that could be located.