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Build Guide

This document is a guide to building Progressia from source. For quick reference, see Build Script Reference.

Compilation should be possible on all platforms that support JDK 8 or later, however, packaging scripts require additional programs in PATH.

This guide assumes you are familiar with using a terminal or Windows Command Prompt or PowerShell.

See Eclipse Guide and IntelliJ IDEA Guide for IDE-specific configuration.

Basic compilation

Installing prerequisites

Compiling Progressia requires that a JDK (Java Development Kit) 8 or later is available in your system path. Please note that JDK is not the same as a JRE (Java Runtime Environment), the software required to execute Java programs; you may be able to run Progressia but not compile it.

To check whether you have the correct JDK installed please run javac -version. If this command fails or outputs version 1.7 or lower, then you need to (re-)install JDK. (javac is the Java Compiler.)

Progressia developers recommend OpenJDK as the free, open-source Java implementation. Confusion may arise from the project's name: OpenJDK issues both JRE and JDK; an OpenJDK JRE is not enough to compile Progressia. Another popular choice is Oracle Java, which is proprietary and thus not recommended.

To install OpenJDK JDK on GNU/Linux, install the appropriately named package with your package manager (on Debian, Ubuntu and other dpkg-based distributions, run apt-get install default-jdk with root privileges).

To install OpenJDK JDK on MacOS or Windows, Progressia developers recommend AdoptOpenJDK, which creates and distributes OpenJDK installers and packages. Please confirm that JDK installed correctly using the aforementioned test.

Getting the source code

Progressia source code is managed with git, a popular open-source tool. It is a program that automatically keeps track of changes in a set of source code and allows synchronization of those changes between different computers. A copy of the source code is called a repository. This guide will assume that Progressia's GitHub repository is accessible; if it is not, please look up the relevant instructions.

If git is installed on your system, perform a clone of https://github.com/OLEGSHA/Progressia.git. The details may vary depending on your git frontend; if you are not using a frontend, issue the following command:

git clone https://github.com/OLEGSHA/Progressia.git

Run the command in your directory of choice, git will create a subfolder. After the action completes you should have a local copy of the source code.

If you do not have git installed, use GitHub's 'Download ZIP' option (available through the green 'Code' button at the time of writing this). Unpack the downloaded archive into any directory.

Compiling

Compilation and related tasks are managed by Gradle, another popular open-source tool. The repository contains a Gradle Wrapper which automatically detects and installs the appropriate Gradle version. Gradle is most conveniently controlled with one of two scripts, gradlew or gradlew.bat for Bash and Windows Command Prompt respectively, which are distributed within the repository as well. Gradle itself uses another file, build.gradle, that contains the relevant instructions in Groovy.

On GNU/Linux and MacOS, the script may need to receive the execution permission before being run:

chmod +x gradlew

A most basic compilation is achieved with:

./gradlew buildLocal

This instructs Gradle to compile, check and test a JAR archive with the game, as well as to download all necessary dependencies. The resulting JAR file will only reference libraries required to run the game on your current platform.

The compiled JAR and all necessary libraries can be found in build/libs/. The lib directory next to Progressia.jar contains all runtime dependencies; the game may be run with a simple java -jar Progressia.jar if lib is located in the same directory as the JAR file. (On many systems double-clicking Progressia.jar has the same effect.) Otherwise, if there is no lib directory next to the JAR, classpath must be set manually with command line options for java.

A more conventional command, ./gradlew build, may be used to the same effect; however, Progressia developers recommend against using it as their effects might start to differ with future updates.

Building for other platforms

Native libraries and why platforms matter

Although Java is well-known for its portability, Progressia has a limited set of architectures that it supports. This is a consequence of the fact that Progressia uses OpenGL, OpenAL, GLFW and STB, four libraries originally implemented in the C language. In order to access them, a Java wrapper library, LWJGL, is used. Unfortunately such wrappers need to be hand-written for each platform and require complicated compilation.

In practice this means that along with the pure Java libraries, such as Guava or GLM, Progressia carries several LWJGL libraries that each consist of a Java interface and a compiled binary implementation (called a native library). A separate version of a single native library is required to run Progressia on different platforms; if a game only contains natives for Windows, it cannot be run on GNU/Linux.

How Gradle is set up

Gradle builds Progressia by first choosing which platform or platforms should be supported. It then downloads, if necessary, and processes only dependencies that are relevant to the current configuration. When creating the JAR file, Gradle appends only selected libraries to the JAR's manifest file. It finally copies only the libraries included in the manifest to the build/libs/lib directory.

Why not package all natives all the time? This is inefficient when producing temporary builds for development purposes because unnecessary dependencies need to be downloaded and processed. This mechanism is also used to trim down the size of various system-specific installers and packages since, for example, a Windows Installer is not expected to produce a installation that runs on anything other than Windows, so GNU/Linux and MacOS natives need not be packaged with it.

Unless instructed otherwise, Gradle only chooses the local platform. Thus the procedure described in 'Basic Compilation' produces an output that only contains the natives for the platform that performed the compilation. It is unsuitable for publication and may be generally inconvenient.

Building cross-platform

Fortunately it is possible to produce a maximally cross-platform version by running Gradle with a different task:

./gradlew buildCrossPlatform

This command performs the same actions as the buildLocal command, except that all possible native libraries are included in the JAR manifest and copied into build/libs/lib. The result may be run on any supported platform. However, because of the large amount of libraries, it has significantly greater size than a platform-specific build.

Building for a specific platform

Some users might find the need to build for a specific set of platforms. Inclusion of GNU/Linux, Windows or MacOS dependencies individually can be controlled with the following arguments to the ./gradlew build command:

  • requestLinuxDependencies requests that natives-linux, natives-linux-arm32 and natives-linux-arm64 binaries are included;
  • requestWindowsDependencies requests that natives-windows, natives-windows-arm64 and natives-windows-x86 binaries are included;
  • requestMacOSDependencies requests that natives-macos, natives-macos-arm64 binaries are included. These requests can be applied in any combination. For example, the following command produces a build containing only GNU/Linux and Windows natives:
./gradlew build requestLinuxDependencies requestWindowsDependencies

Packaging

A universal ZIP distribution, a Debian package and a Windows NSIS installer may be created automatically by the build script.

Creating a universal ZIP package

A universal cross-platform ZIP archive can be created with the following Gradle task:

./gradlew packageZip

Gradle will then build all artifacts necessary to run the game on all available platforms and package game files, libraries, launch scripts, etc. into a compressed ZIP archive.

The resulting file can be found in build/packages/

Creating a Debian package

A Debian package can be created with the following Gradle task:

./gradlew packageDeb

Gradle will then build all artifacts necessary to run the game on GNU/Linux (all three architectures) and invoke dpkg-deb. Commands dpkg-deb must be available in system path in order to build the package.

Creating a Windows installer

A Windows NSIS installer can be created with the following Gradle task:

./gradlew packageNsis

Gradle will then build all artifacts necessary to run the game on Windows (both x64 and x86 architectures) and invoke makensis.

Windows installers are implemented with NSIS. ImageMagick, a command-line image editing tool, is used to generate some assets for the installer. Commands makensis and convert (from ImageMagick) must be available in system path in order to build the installer.