NostraEngine

A 3D game engine.

The NostraEngine is a project created by students of the htw saar (https://www.htwsaar.de/) and supervised by Dipl-Inf (FH) Christopher Olbertz.

GitHub: https://github.com/Lehks/NostraEngine

If you do not have the code yet, use the following command to clone the repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/Lehks/NostraEngine.git

or download the ZIP-compressed directly from GitHub using the link above.

Building the Project

To build this project, CMake is required. See this (https://cmake.org/install/) link for an explanation on how to install CMake. The minimum required version of CMake is 3.8.2. On Windows, Visual Studio (https://www.visualstudio.com) is also a requirement.

Additionally, the C+ compiler needs to support C++17 or higher. The latest Version of Visual Studio supports C++17 and GCC has full support for C++17 in version 7 and higher.

Building the project is done in two steps:

1. Generating platform dependent configuration files (e.g. a Makefile or Visual Studio Solution) using CMake (Chapter Calling CMake).
2. Compiling the code from those configuration files and installing it (Chapter Build and Install).

Calling CMake

In this chapter, CMake will be used to generate platform dependent configuration files (e.g. a Makefile or a Visual Studio Solution). Those configuration files will then later be used to actually build the project.

Calling CMake is done from the terminal. It is also assumed that the command cmake reachable through the system's PATH variable.

First, we need to cd into the directory where the configuration files should be placed by CMake. This can be any directory, except for the directory that contains the source files. In the following, /path/to/source/root will be used as a placeholder for the path to the root directory of the source tree and /path/to/build/root will be used as a placeholder for the path to the root directory of the build tree. Both paths may be absolute or abstract.

To get to the root directory of the build tree, use:

1. mkdir /path/to/build/root
2. cd /path/to/build/root

To create the configuration files, call cmake /path/to/source/root

CMake Variables

The behavior of CMake can be altered by passing variables when configuring. Variables are passed by using cmake -D<name>=<value> /path/to/source/root.

Common variables are:

• CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX: The path to the directory that the engine will be installed in. By default, this is C:\Program Files (x86)\NostraEngine on Windows and /opt/NostraEngine on Unix and Linux.

• NOE_GENERATE_DOC: If enabled, Doxygen will be used to generate the documentation. Note: This requires Doxygen to be installed. By default, this is set to ON and the only possible values are ON and OFF.

Build and Install

To build the engine, the command
cmake --build /path/to/build/root is used.

Afterwards, the engine is installed by using the command cmake --build /path/to/build/root --target install

Note that, for the latter command, administrative/root privileges are usually required (on Windows, administrative privileges are required if the engine is installed on the C:\ partition, on Linux root privileges are always required).

Linux only: After the installation, the command ldconfig needs to be executed. This command requires root privileges.

Dependencies

This Engine relies on a bunch of 3rd Party libraries. Here is a full list of all of them:

• GLFW (http://www.glfw.org/): Source Code has not been altered, but only the files that are required for building the library (this excludes e.g. the examples) have been imported. The CMakeLists.txt files have been altered.
• GLAD (http://glad.dav1d.de/): None of the files have been altered.
• SQLite3 (https://www.sqlite.org/index.html): Both the sqlite3.c and sqlite3.h files were altered to allow for the generation of shared libraries.