This past week I decided to look into CxxTest. I was attracted to it since what I’ve read was that it was easy to use and highly portable. Unfortunately I found that there was no documentation on how to set it up on your system. It took me way too long to find out that this “Production/Stable” project doesn’t have installation instructions or packages to do so. Also, the Source Forge project page is very quiet. The developer apparently isn’t very active. This is disconcerting, but I think I have figured out how to setup CxxTest on my Debian system. I haven’t actually been able to use it yet, but I hope to rectify that within the next week. Hopefully it is going to be useful.
I also decided to take a closer look at two C++ Game APIs: GameBlade and Kyra. GameBlade seems to be suffering an even worse fate that CxxTest: it’s project page hasn’t been updated since January of last year, and it’s considered in Beta state! I might look at it later, but I didn’t see much in the way of documentation.
The Sprite Engine Kyra, on the other hand, looks great. It works on Win32 and GNU/Linux platforms, and the demo showed off some cool capabilities. It’s possible to have multiple views of the same scenes, with some views at different zoom levels! Scaling, color transformations, and alpha blending at per-image or per-pixel levels are just some of the other features. I’m really excited about using this engine, although I am thrown off by the sprite editor requiring hot spots and alignment since I would think these are things that I need to control within the program.
I may look into more cross-platform Game APIs, but Kyra looks to be a lot of fun and is very mature. It looks like I’ll need to put in some time to learn how to use it effectively, time that is tough to find these days, but it should be worth it if it will allow me to create games that much easier.