Contents  Introduction  Exception Handling  Basic ClanLib  Application  Wrapping it Up  Printable version     The Series  Getting Started

Introduction

Ah, ClanLib. When I first began to program games, ClanLib was one of the first things I used to make simple games. It’s low-level enough to give the programmer complete control over almost everything on a computer, while at the same time being much simpler than other SDKs, such as DirectX. ClanLib is also distributed under GNU, so anyone can modify the source code and add features to it as they see fit, and as a result, it is very actively maintained. But the one feature that sets ClanLib apart is it’s portability: It’s source can be compiled under Linux, Windows, and BeOS without any change in the code (except that BeOS support had lagged in the past, but it’s catching up now).

In this series of articles I will demonstrate how ClanLib is used and what can be done with it. In the end, I will even write a complete game using nothing but ClanLib. Before we get started, you need to head over to http://clanlib.org and get ClanLib 0.4.x or higher (all the examples in this use the 0.4.x tree, so compatibility is not guaranteed with the 0.5.x tree), in addition to the other libs that ClanLib requires. I have 0.4.4 as I am writing this, though all of the examples I give should work with anything from 0.4.x (assuming the version you have doesn’t have any bugs in it). I will not go into detail on what you need and how to install as the site tells you everything that you will need for this. You will also need a basic understanding of C++.

Okay, now that you have ClanLib installed (you do have it now, right?), we can proceed…

Next : Exception Handling