Rubygame Tutorial Part 1

NOTE: This tutorial is replaced by The Rubygame Book.




This tutorial series is a crash course in writing video games using the Ruby programming languages and Rubygame, a game development library for Ruby. It assumes that you have basic knowledge of programming along with knowledge of the Ruby programming language.

If you do not have Rubygame and/or the Ruby interpreter installed, it is suggested that you do so before continuing this tutorial. This tutorial will assume you're using 2.0.1 version of Rubygame.

In this series, we will be creating a dodgeball game using just Rubygame and Ruby as we write this tutorial out. No other libraries will be used. The final game will be licensed under the GPL. This game will be called Rubies Dodgeball!

In Part 1 of this tutorial, we'll be creating a screen and than setting up a basic game loop.

Initialize a Display Screen

We'll start by assuming that everything will be in one directory named rubies_dodgeball.


The first thing you will do is set up the neccessary items to create a rubygame application. After you accomplish that task, you will create a screen, the display window for the game.

Create a file in the rubies_dodgeball directory: dodgeball.rb


require"rubygame"
require"lib/loop.rb"
include Rubygame


Setting up Rubies Dodgeball to use rubygame.

Create a file in the rubies_dodgeball/lib directory: loop.rb


class GameLoop
def initialize
@screen = Screen.new([800,600],0,[Rubygame::HWSURFACE, Rubygame::DOUBLEBUF])
end
end


We set up the display screen with the size of 800 by 600 resolution in the first agurement of Screen.new, next one with no depth, and the last with flags Rubygame::HWSURFACE(It makes a video surface in video memory) and the Rubygame::DOUBLEBUF will enable hardware double buffering. There are other king of flags such as the one that can enable fullscreen mode. Of course, we need to initialize the GameLoop class in order to take effects. This should be placed at the end of file dodgeball.rb


game = GameLoop.new


Once you run the program, it should display a brief display window. Since it has no loop, the program will terminates quickly.

Adding a Loop and an EventQueue

Next, we add an EventQueue with a loop into the game. We modify loop.rb's GameLoop class in the following fashion:


class GameLoop
def initialize
@screen = Screen.new([800,600],0,[Rubygame::HWSURFACE, Rubygame::DOUBLEBUF])
@q = Rubygame::EventQueue.new()
end
def run
loop do
@q.each do |ev|
case ev
when Rubygame::QuitEvent
Rubygame.quit
return
end
end
end
end
end


Rubygame::EventQueue is used to detect keyboard presses, mouseclicks, movements of mouse, and other input devices.There are hundreds of constants that correspond to a particular keyboard keys, mouse buttons, and more. For example Rubygame:K_ESCAPE is for the escape button.

Rubygame.quit() is a method that should be used when Rubygame applications are about to be terminated. Notes that it isn't used for quiting the application, rather it clean up the messes it might have. For example, if you exit while in Fullscreen mode, users' desktop resolution will become that application's dispaly screen size, which is very annoying. Rubygame.quit() helps prevent such annoyance and confusions from happening.

Don't forget to add game.run() at the end of the file dodgeball.rb!


game.run()


When you run it, the application should go on forever, sucking all the available CPU resources that it can get, until you click that X button in the window.

You can download the file here.

This is it, folks. That is all we're going to learn for this part.

What's coming next in part 2!:

How to reduce the CPU resource usage to a saner level

Addition of a sprite system.


Until next time!

Kiba,


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