Now that we've gotten a good understanding of why we would want to use design patterns, let's get set up the game engine that we will be using over the course of the book: the Mach5 engine. Now in order to get started, we will need to download the engine as well as the software needed to run the project. Perform the following steps:
- Open up your web browser of choice and visit the following website: https://beta.visualstudio.com/downloads/. Once there, move to the
Visual Studio Community
version on the left and then click on theFree download
option, as shown in the following screenshot:
- If you get a window asking what to do with the file, go ahead and open it or save and then open it by clicking on the
Run
button:
- From there, wait until the installer pops up, then select
Custom
, and then click onNext
to start downloading the program:
- Now once you get to the
Features
section, uncheck whatever is selected and then open up theProgramming Languages
tab and checkVisual C++
. You may go ahead and remove the other options, as we will not be using them. Then go ahead and click on theNext
button, thenInstall
, and allow it to make changes to your computer:
You may need to wait a while at this point, so go ahead and get yourself a coffee, and once it's finished you'll need to restart your computer. After that, go ahead and continue with the project.
- Once you've finished installing, you next need to actually install the engine itself. With that in mind, go over to https://github.com/mattCasanova/Mach5 and from there, click on the
Clone or download
section and then click onDownload ZIP
:
- Once you're finished with the download, go ahead and unzip the file to a folder of your choice; then open up the
Mach5-master\EngineTest
folder, double-click on theEngineTest.sln
file, and start up Visual Studio. - You may get a login screen asking you to log in; go ahead and sign up or press the
Not now, maybe later
option on the bottom of the screen. You can then pick a color theme; then clickStart Visual Studio
. - Upon starting, you may get a security warning asking if you'd still like to open this project. This is displayed from any Visual Studio solution that wasn't made on your machine, so it wants to make sure that you know where it came from, but in this case the project is perfectly safe. Go ahead and uncheck the
Ask me for every project in this solution option
and then selectOK
:
- Once it's finished loading, you should finally see the Visual Studio interface, which should look like this:
Visual Studio is a very powerful tool and, for developers, it can be quite useful to learn all of the functionality that it has. We'll be discussing the features as we use them, but this book shouldn't be considered the end-all book on Visual Studio.
Note
If you're interested in learning more about the Visual Studio interface, check out: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj620919.aspxa.
- The engine is built to work on 32-bit processors, so change the x64 dropdown to x86 and then click the
Play
button or press F5. It will then ask if you wish to rebuild the project. Go ahead and sayYes
. If all goes well, you should eventually see a debug window and a gameplay window as well. After a few seconds, it should transition to a simple default project:
You can play around by using the W, A, and D keys to move the character around and the Spacebar to shoot bullets at enemies. Once you're finished playing around, go ahead and hit the Esc key to go to the menu, and then click on the Quit
button to leave the project and go back to the editor!