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WAUthethird / Marble-Marcher-Community-Edition

A community-developed version of the original Marble Marcher - a fractal physics game.
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Marble Marcher: Community Edition

Version 1.4.5

Logo

This is the community edition of Marble Marcher, a procedurally rendered fractal physics marble game in which you must get to the flag in each level as fast as you can. If you complete all 24 original levels, cheats are unlocked for extra fun!

Because version 1.1.0 was the last feature update of Marble Marcher, we (the Marble Marcher Community) opted to create a community edition to keep the community around the game alive and continuously improve the experience. Currently this is maintained mainly by members of the Marble Marcher Community on Discord, in addition to the members of the subreddit and anyone else who has contributed.

Marble Marcher: Community Edition comes with a wealth of new features and improvements, including performance improvements and graphical enhancements.

If you have suggestions, issues, or would like to contribute, feel free to submit issues and pull requests. After all, this is a community project!

Just as the original Marble Marcher, the game is particularly GPU heavy, but nonetheless it is optimized to run about 100% to 200% faster with the same resolution and also has customisable graphics settings.

speedrun.com link: https://www.speedrun.com/marblemarcher

itch.io link: https://michaelmoroz.itch.io/mmce

Web port: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/3lKyDR

All credit goes to HackerPoet (aka CodeParade) for the original game.

Original Summary

Marble Marcher is a video game demo that uses a fractal physics engine and fully procedural rendering to produce beautiful and unique gameplay unlike anything you've seen before.

The goal of the game is to reach the flag as quickly as possible. But be careful not to fall off the level or get crushed by the fractal! There are 24 levels to unlock.

Download Link: https://codeparade.itch.io/marblemarcher

Video Explanation: https://youtu.be/9U0XVdvQwAI

Table of Contents

Changes

Compared to the original game, the following features and improvements have been added as of the current version of MMCE:

Proposed Changes

Though Marble Marcher CE is a largely finished game, there are still several improvements we'd like to implement. Here are our proposed changes:

Graphics Settings

There are multiple shader configurations in the settings menu.

main.cfg - Default shader configuration, normal rendering with PBR materials and simple ray marched AO. Use this while playing. Also uses TXAA and supports DOF.

PTGI.cfg - Path traced global illumination, attempts to simulate light propagation in the fractal scene. It is graphically unstable and requires time for the light samples to converge, so it is not recommended to use while playing. Use it mainly to make screenshots. Uses TXAA, supports DOF.

original.cfg - The original Marble Marcher shading, except the AO.

simple.cfg - The simplest working shader, use if your computer is a potato.

neon.cfg - Makes fractals look like they are glowing clouds.

noise_test.cfg - An example of noise and a simplest shader pipeline, mainly useful for development purposes.

The screenshot resolution and rendering resolutions are separate, so you can, for example, play in 720p and take screenshots in 4K. There is also the screenshot samples parameter, the more you use, the better the screenshot will look (if the shader uses temporal denoise).

System Dependencies

MacOS (Currently unsupported, see below)

On macOS these can be conveniently installed using HomeBrew:

brew install cmake eigen sfml anttweakbar glew glm

The version of SFML required is 2.5.1 or newer. It has come to my attention that HomeBrew does now have this version (unlike when these instructions where first written) so installing via HomeBrew should work but you can still download manually if you wish and install using these instructions. You must install the Frameworks option not the dylib option or the build script may fail. Note that if HomeBrew installed a version of SFML older than 2.5.1 for some reason or you wish to install manually, you must remove the version of SFML that Brew installed using brew remove sfml.

Alternatively, vcpkg can be used though it is unsupported:

vcpkg install cmake eigen3 sfml anttweakbar

It may also be possible to use MacPorts which is also unsupported and untested.

Arch Linux

The packages eigen, sfml, glm, git, cmake and make are on the core, extra and community repositories. sudo pacman -S eigen sfml glm git cmake make However, anttweakbar is on the AUR. Clone and build it yourself, or use and AUR Helper like yay : yay -S anttweakbar

Building

MacOS

Build Script

Please note that the version of OpenGL that ships with MacOS does not work with compute shaders, which MMCE depends upon. Due to this, the MacOS port is considered completely unworking, and there is no current way to run it successfully. The instructions below have been retained, should another option arise in the future.

Note for the current version: the macOS build is not yet entirely working properly so revert to the previous prerelease as required. SFML is properly included but as of yet, AntTweakBar is not so this executable will not work on machines without it installed. Simply run ./macOSBuildExec.sh ( You can alternatively use macOSBuildBundle which is the old version of the script, which will generate a full .app file instead of a normal unix executable). This will generate the MarbleMarcher executable that can be used like any other application. It can even be used on systems without SFML as SFML is included in the bundle and the binary is relinked to these versions (As stated above it currently does not work on systems without AntTweakBar installed). Currently the script will only do the relinking part properly if you use SFML 2.5.1 specifically however it is planned to allow for any version. If you have another version, the script will still work, the app just won't work on a machine without SFML.

Manual

Due to macOS being unable to find GLM_INCLUDE_DIR it is now assumed to be ./glm . In order for this method to work, GLM should now be manually installed into that directory.

Note that this just builds a binary and not an Application bundle like you might be used to seeing. To run properly, you must move the binary (which, after building, is build/MarbleMarcher). It is not recommended to build the Application bundle manually so no instructions for that are provided however you may peek in macOSBuildBundle.sh to see how it is done.

Alternatively, one can use the platform-dependent build system, for example Make:

Arch Linux

Alternatively, you can install the AUR package at marblemarcher-git using your preferred AUR Helper.

Ubuntu

The main problem with the installation is the dependency AntTweakBar, a C++ library with no Ubuntu package.

But the first and easy step is to ensure that the following development tools and libraries are installed: libsfml-dev, libglm-dev, libeigen3-dev, libglew-dev, cmake, libglu1-mesa-dev and mesa-common-dev. You can get it done with

sudo apt-get install libsfml-dev libglm-dev libeigen3-dev \
     libglew-dev cmake libglu1-mesa-dev mesa-common-dev

You may need to install more (or fewer) libraries, depending on what do you already have on your system.

How to Install on Ubuntu 20.04

The first step is to download and install AntTweakBar library. I assume you have unpacked it into Downloads folder. The installation is as easy as running make in AntTweakBar/src folder. As a result, make should create libAntTweakBar.a and libAntTweakBar.so in your AntTweakBar/lib folder. You may want to move those to a better location, e.g. into $HOME/lib.

This installation can be done with commands

cd ~/Downloads/AntTweakBar/src
make

The next task is to clone (or download) Marble Marcher. In the following examples we assume you have downloaded Marble Marcher into Downloads-folder as well. First you create an empty folder build in the Marble Marcher folder, and run cmake from there. However, and this is important, for the following compilation step you also have to specify the location of AntTweakBar.h and libAntTweakBar.a files using the CPATH and LIBRARY_PATH environment variables. You can do all these steps as follows:

cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/WAUthethird/Marble-Marcher-Community-Edition.git
cd Marble-Marcher-Community-Edition
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
CPATH="$HOME/Downloads/AntTweakBar/include/" LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/Downloads/AntTweakBar/lib" cmake --build .

This should create an executable file MarbleMarcher in the current src folder.

The executable needs libAntTweakBar.so run-time library for running. So when executing it, you have to tell it where the library is by using LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. Hence you run the game as

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/Downloads/AntTweakBar/lib" ./MarbleMarcher

Consider moving libAntTweakBar.so into a dedicated location for run-time libraries and configuring your LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

Enjoy!

Installing on Ubuntu 18.04

Compiling on Ubuntu 18.04 works mostly in the same way as on Ubuntu 20.04. However, the default gcc 7.5.0 is too old for the source code. You have to use gcc 8.4.0, provided in the package gcc-8. First, install all the packages required for Ubuntu 20.04. Thereafter also install gcc-8:

sudo apt-get install libsfml-dev libglm-dev libeigen3-dev \
     libglew-dev cmake libglu1-mesa-dev mesa-common-dev
sudo apt-get install gcc-8

Next, as the default gcc is still version 7, we have to tell make and cmake explicitly that we we want gcc 8 instead.

Open AntTweakBar/src/Makefile in a text editor (e.g. gedit), and set the make variables CXX and LINK (see lines 18 and 21) to gcc-8 and g++-8.
So the relevant lines should look like

CXX         = gcc-8
CXXFLAGS    = $(CXXCFG) -Wall -fPIC -fno-strict-aliasing -D_UNIX -D__PLACEMENT_NEW_INLINE
INCPATH     = -I../include -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/usr/include
LINK        = g++-8

Now run make in the src-folder as in case of Ubuntu 20.04:

cd AntTweakBar/src
make

Cloning Marble Marcher on Ubuntu 18.04 works exactly as on Ubuntu 20.04. But now, when creating cmake environment, we tell cmake that we use gcc-8 by setting CC and CXX environment variables. Otherwise we follow exactly the steps for Ubuntu 20.04. So on 18.04 you can do

cd ~/Downloads
git clone https://github.com/WAUthethird/Marble-Marcher-Community-Edition.git
cd Marble-Marcher-Community-Edition
mkdir build
cd build             
CC=/usr/bin/gcc-8 CXX=/usr/bin/g++-8 cmake ..
CPATH="$HOME/Downloads/AntTweakBar/include/" LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/Downloads/AntTweakBar/lib" cmake --build .

As above, you should see the executable MarbleMarcher that can be started with

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/Downloads/AntTweakBar/lib" ./MarbleMarcher

Compiling on Windows

Windows compilation should work just fine now. It's relatively easy to do without help, but in case you'd like them, here are some configuring and compiling instructions.

Cross-Compile for Windows on macOS

This requires you to install wget, mingw-w64, and git (which you probably already have) either with HomeBrew (recommended) or otherwise. Theoretically, you should be able to just run winMacOSBuild.sh. There are no manual instructions because due to issues I had to just compile the thing manually which is annoying and has too many steps.

Launching

macOS

If the macOS build script was used, simply launch the app as normal, otherwise:

./MarbleMarcher: error while loading shared libraries: libsfml-graphics.so.2.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory You'll just need to run MarbleMarcher with the correct LD_LIBRARY_PATH:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=`pwd`/usr/lib ./MarbleMarcher

Windows/Linux/Anything Else

Launching should be self-explanatory for these systems, just run the executable file relevant to your system that is generated by the build process.

Special Controls

Troubleshooting/FAQ