Andrew Kesterson
88aaa184e4
examples/sidescroller and examples/jrpg are complete programs, built with the library and exercised headless by ctest. The chapters quote them with `c excerpt=examples/...` blocks rather than restating the code, so a chapter cannot drift from a program that compiles -- the excerpt check fails the moment the source moves. 34 excerpts in one chapter, 21 in the other. The two are complementary. The sidescroller is the physics tutorial: gravity, a jump, coins, hazards. The JRPG is the content-pipeline tutorial: a town map, NPCs spawned from map objects, four-way per-facing animation, a text box, a follower. Both smoke tests drive real SDL_Events through akgl_controller_handle_event and step the physics clock at a fixed 1/60s rather than sleeping, so a scripted run is deterministic and finishes in under five seconds. Writing them is what turned up most of the defects recorded in the next commit, because a game exercises paths a unit test does not. Each workaround says in the chapter which library gap forced it: - collision is written in a custom movementlogicfunc, because akgl_physics_arcade_collide raises AKERR_API and akgl_physics_simulate never calls collide at all; - the sidescroller cancels the step's own gravity when it blocks downward, because otherwise a quarter-pixel of penetration makes the *horizontal* sweep report blocked and the character walks backwards a tile at a time; - both clear movement_controls_face on every map-spawned actor, because the default facefunc leaves a stopped actor with no facing bit, no sprite, and no draw; - the JRPG's follower gets a renderfunc that nulls obj->parent for the duration of the draw, because a child's offset is counted twice. Assets are CC0 from three Kenney packs, vendored with per-pack licence text, per-file provenance, and the geometry contract in docs/tutorials/assets/README.md. CC0 specifically rather than merely free: a reader who copies a tutorial into their own game inherits no obligation. scripts/fetch_tutorial_assets.sh refreshes them in the shape mkcontrollermappings.sh was fixed into for 0.5.0 -- it checks curl's status, refuses a pack page that does not say CC0, verifies the archive and the staged dimensions, and leaves the tracked bytes untouched on any failure. Both failure paths were tested, and a no-op refresh is byte-identical. Co-Authored-By: Claude Code <noreply@anthropic.com> Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The libakgl manual
libakgl is a C library for building 2D games on SDL3. It is not an engine: there is no
editor, no scripting layer, no inheritance and no runtime malloc. Behaviour attaches to a
struct as function pointers, objects come from fixed pools, and every call reports failure
through an error context you cannot silently ignore.
This manual teaches the library. It deliberately does not re-document its dependencies
— libakerror owns the error-handling protocol, SDL3 owns renderers and events, Tiled owns
the map format, jansson owns the JSON API. Each chapter says what libakgl adds or
constrains, shows what a caller actually writes, and links out for the rest. For
per-function reference, build the Doxygen output with doxygen Doxyfile.
| 1. Introduction | What libakgl is, what it refuses to be, the frame budget, and who owns which documentation |
| 2. Design philosophy | Bounded pools, pluggable backends, bit flags, name-based registries, one world at a time |
| 3. Getting started | Dependencies, add_subdirectory vs akgl.pc, and the smallest program that opens a window |
| 4. Errors and status codes | The status tables, what each code means here, and the traps that fail silently |
| 5. The heap | The five pools, akgl_heap_next_*, akgl_String, and why exhaustion usually means a missing release |
| 6. The registry | The eight registries, configuration properties, and the id-0 silent no-op |
| 7. The game and the frame | Startup order, akgl_game_update, the state lock, iterators, savegames |
| 8. Rendering | The backend vtable, the frame contract, cameras, and embedding a host's own SDL_Renderer |
| 9. Drawing | Points, lines, rectangles, circles, flood fill, and saving a region |
| 10. Spritesheets and sprites | One texture shared by path, the sprite JSON format, frame animation |
| 11. Characters | State-to-sprite mappings, movement constants, the character JSON format |
| 12. Actors | The state bitmask, the six behaviour hooks, parents and children, layers |
| 13. Tilemaps | Tiled TMJ, libakgl's three extensions, and the limits that bind a map |
| 14. Physics | Thrust, environment and velocity; the null and arcade backends; what is not implemented |
| 15. Input | Control maps, push-not-poll dispatch, the keystroke ring, gamepads |
| 16. Text and fonts | Loading, drawing, measuring, and the teardown order that matters |
| 17. Audio | The three-voice synthesizer, and the separate background-music path |
| 18. Utilities | Collision helpers, path resolution, the JSON accessors, static strings |
| 19. Tutorial: a 2D sidescroller | Gravity, a jump, collision you write yourself, coins and hazards |
| 20. Tutorial: a top-down JRPG | A town map, NPCs spawned from map objects, four-way animation, a text box, a follower |
| 21. Appendix | Every limit, every status, every configuration property |
Both tutorials are complete programs under examples/. They build with the
library and run headless in CI, and the chapters quote them rather than restating them — so
a tutorial cannot drift from a program that compiles.
Every example here is checked
The examples in these chapters are compiled, linked, run, and cross-checked against the
source tree by the test suite. A snippet that stops compiling, an excerpt that no longer
matches the header it quotes, or a JSON document the loader would reject turns
ctest -R docs_examples red.
This exists because the documentation it replaces had drifted badly: the previous FAQ's
examples did not compile — two unbalanced PASS() calls, a sprite->frameids = [0, 1, 2, 3];
that is not C in any dialect, and, in the first snippet a reader ever saw, the exact
strncpy call AGENTS.md forbids. The prose had drifted with it, and writing these
chapters turned up twenty-seven header claims that were false against src/.
Where a chapter documents behaviour that is a known defect rather than a design decision,
it says so and points at TODO.md. See MAINTENANCE.md if you are editing an example.
Assets
The tutorial art, tiles and music are CC0, vendored under
tutorials/assets/ with provenance recorded per file in
PROVENANCE.md and geometry documented in
README.md. CC0 specifically, not merely free: a reader who
copies a tutorial into their own game inherits no obligation.