They read as design commentary: why a choice was made, what the previous state
of the project was, which library defect a line works around. That is useful to
somebody who already knows the library and useless to somebody trying to build a
game, which is who a tutorial is for.
Both chapters now open with a screenshot of what the reader is building and a
numbered list of the steps to get there, and each step is its own section: what
you are trying to achieve, the code that achieves it, and the two or three things
about that code that are easy to get wrong. Chapter 20 starts from first
principles -- what a sprite, a character, an actor and a tilemap are, and the
four error macros -- and chapter 21 assumes it and covers what a top-down game
adds.
Where a line exists because of a defect, the line comes first and the defect
comes after it, with a pointer to the TODO entry that will remove the need. A
reader who is copying code should not have to read an apology before they can use
it.
The library's own history is gone from both. That belongs in the design chapters
and in git.
Two new docs_examples setups stage the tutorials' own art, so the sprite and
character files a reader is shown are loaded exactly as printed rather than
through a generic fixture. `json excerpt=` is new for the same reason: a Tiled
object is now quoted out of the real map instead of being retyped. Excerpts
across docs/ go from 91 to 137.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KzBDV2fqgnUAcqCKqKvc71
Both examples gain --screenshot PATH and --screenshot-frame N. The capture sits
between the world being drawn and the frame being presented, because
SDL_RenderPresent is where the target stops being readable, and it works under
the dummy video driver and the software renderer like the rest of the headless
path does.
`cmake --build build --target docs_game_figures` regenerates
docs/images/sidescroller.png and docs/images/jrpg.png by running each game to a
chosen frame. Same contract as docs_screenshots: deliberate, never part of a
build, because the PNGs are tracked. There is no --check counterpart, and the
target says why -- the sidescroller drives its physics from the wall clock, so a
byte comparison would fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the
documentation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KzBDV2fqgnUAcqCKqKvc71
cell_solid and feet_blocked go, and so does the prediction in the player's
movementlogicfunc. That prediction was only ever exact because the town has zero
gravity and zero drag -- v is t, so `x + tx * dt` is where the step lands. A map
with gravity would have had to fold ey in as well, which is the game
re-implementing the integrator. Resolution runs after the move now, so there is
nothing to predict.
The map's decoration layer carries `collidable`, which retires JRPG_LAYER_SOLID:
akgl_TilemapLayer has no name member, so the game and the map had to agree on an
index out of band and inserting a layer in Tiled broke it.
The edge of the world is not on any layer, so it is four static proxies covering
the outer ring plus a tile of overhang -- one pool slot per side instead of a
hundred solid tiles, and the first use of the static-proxy path in either
example. They carry LAYER_STATIC explicitly: shape_box defaults a shape to
LAYER_ACTOR, and a wall left on that layer is a wall everything walks through.
Only the player gets a shape. NPCs stand still and are spoken to; the follower
is a child snapped to its parent every step.
Verified against the old implementation with the demo script rewritten to hold
one direction: holding left into a building stops the player at x=122 with both,
and holding up into the map's edge stops them at y=-4 with both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KzBDV2fqgnUAcqCKqKvc71
A pure rename plus link rewrite and nothing else. Collision is a pluggable
subsystem with two implementations, shapes, a response hook and a tile binding;
that is a chapter, and burying it inside the physics chapter is the shape this
manual otherwise avoids -- rendering and drawing are 8 and 9, spritesheets and
characters and actors are 10, 11 and 12.
Kept separate from writing the chapter because **nothing validates a
cross-reference target.** The example harness reads fenced blocks; it does not
follow links. A rename mixed into five hundred lines of new prose is not
reviewable, and a broken link would land silently. As its own commit it is
reviewable as a rename, and a grep for dangling `](NN-` targets is clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Code <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
