Getting Started

TurtleBrains is a C++ Game Development framework great for two-dimensional games and building simple applications like game tools. It is currently in alpha status and the API may continue to change until it gets more stable. Check out the following features of the TurtleBrains framework to see if TurtleBrains is a fit for your particular project.

Is TurtleBrains for your project?

• What is TurtleBrains
• Licensing Details
• Coding Standards
• Made With TurtleBrains

Setting up TurtleBrains

Getting the framework setup is not terribly hard, but it could be easier with some work and for that reason the documentation in this area will be very brief and slightly incomplete as it is expected that this process changes in future versions to be much easier. Perhaps my template project using premake will get released. Until then it is going to require an intermediate understanding of C++ includes and linker options within your IDE.

Start by Download TurtleBrains the latest version.

• Create a new project with your IDE, (recommend a win32 console application for Visual Studio for ease, or define WIN32 in IDE options)
• Add all TurtleBrains% source files to your project, most IDE's should support drag and drop of source directory.
  • C++11 is used within the source files, so you may need to set an option in your IDE.
  • (Because Objective-C .mm files are used on mac, it may be required to remove those from Windows/Linux builds)
• Add the external_libraries/includes directory to the compilers include search paths.
• Add the appropriate external_libraries/libraries/ to the linkers search paths.
  • Windows requires linking with: OpenGL32, glew32, and OpenAL32
  • Mac OS X requires linking with: AppKit.framework, OpenGL.framework, glew, and OpenAL.framework
  • Linux requires linking with: xlib, GL, GLEW, and openal
• Add a preprocessor (in the IDE options) define for your platform: tb_windows, tb_macosx or tb_linux
  • If starting from a empty project in Visual Studio, also make sure WIN32 is defined.
• Add a source file including the main() function which starts up the project and you should be good to go!

Starting with Application Development
Starting with Game Development

Questions? Ask the developer!