It's a game development framework that is based on the SDL and OpenGL libraries. XRhodes wraps SDL's and OpenGL's functionality, making it more convenient to take advantage of their power, while not sacrificing speed.
It also offers higher level functionality, such as math utilities, sprites, bitmap fonts, state and resource management, spatial hashing, collision detection, a text based serialisation format and much more.
XRhodes is intended primarily for 2D / 2.5D games, however it already offers functionality to support 3D, and more is underway.
XRhodes is NOT:
- a game authoring tool, like Game Maker or Unity.
- a scripting tool. It will take care of lower level tasks and it has some text processing functionality, even a lightweight text-based serialisation format, but there's no scripting support yet.
- a physics library. There are basic math and physics utilities (vectors, matrices, reflections, some collision detection), but if you are after some physics-heavy stuff, you might want to also use one of the Box2D or Chipmunk libraries.
It's fast and stable, lovingly handcrafted, thoroughly tested, refactored a thousand times - XRhodes has been in the works since 2007. It will assist you a lot while restricting you very little at most.
Also: XRhodes ships as a static library, saving you the DLL hassle.
You will need GCC (get it with MinGW under Windows), OpenGL and SDL set up. GCC is what XRhodes was built with, and due to certain characteristics of C++, it will not work with other compilers. Sorry.
On the upside, there are great IDEs for GCC, such as Apple's Xcode or the open source Code::Blocks. You'll get your project templates for these IDEs too, to get you started that much quicker.
There are excellent tutorials on setting SDL up. If this is new information, you might want to skim through them.
Glad you asked! Firstly, there's documentation, then there are the mailing list and the forums where you can connect with other users of the framework and get some help from who are probably the friendliest and sexiest people around the globe. Yep.
We'll soon have tutorials too.
No, it's not - XRhodes is freeware. It did cost me though, so if you immensely enjoy working with the framework and you feel that it has made your life easier, please consider giving a donation. This will help me continue development. Thank you!
You can certainly download a copy. We have it in Mac OS X and Windows flavors but given the wide range support that OpenGL and SDL enjoys, XRhodes might just pop up on other platforms in the near future.