Installation

This page describes the process to install the Zel Game Engine on your machine.

Attention

Make sure to not have any spaces in the file path! So instead of having C:/My Projects/Zel Game Engine/ZelGameEngine.sln you need to remove the spaces and do it like this C:/My_Projects/Zel_Game_Engine/ZelGameEngine.sln

Downloading The Engine

First you need to download the required files. This can be done by cloning the Github repository or just downloading it directly.

If you’ve never used Github before the recommended option is to go to Downloading The Repository

Cloning The Repository

Cloning a repository won’t be explained in this documentation. Luckily there are plenty of resources out there including Github’s own documentation.

The engine’s repository can be found here. It has most of the files needed for the engine.

When you have cloned the repository, you can skip to Setting Up Visual Studio.

Downloading The Repository

Downloading the engine is rather simple. Go to the engine’s repository. Then click on the green code button and click on Download Zip in the dropdown menu. This way you’ll download the latest master version of the engine.

Setting Up Visual Studio

Right now the engine has been used with Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019. Any Visual Studio version from VS2015 onwards should therefore be good. Other build environments won’t be supported anytime soon.

Open the solution through ZelGameEngine.sln You may see an upgrade prompt when opening the solution. Make sure to click “OK”, otherwise the engine probably will not run.

Note

If you are already past this point, you need to upgrade the solution manually. This can be done by going into the Properties of each project. Then set the Platform Toolset and SDK to the installed versions on your system.

After Visual Studio has loaded the solution, you’ll see two projects. One named Application and another named ZelGameEngine.

Configurations

The engine works with two configurations: Debug and Release. Some features may be disabled in the Release configuration. The output console, where all messages from zel_print will appear, is one of them.

Testing the setup

At this point you should be able to run the project. Be sure to set the configuration on Debug.

If everything went well, you won’t be seeing any build errors. A somewhat dark (blue) window should appear with a command prompt window. In the command prompt window you can see the engine’s version as well as “Hello World”.

Note

If you do get errors or any other issue, please check again if you followed the instructions correctly. If the problems persist, please open an issue on the documentation’s Github issues page describing the problem you have.

What’s Next?

Now that you have everything setup, you can start creating your game. It is highly recommended to read the Migration Guide first. It will be the best way to get you familiar with the Zel Game Engine. It will explain the differences between this engine and the ones you are used to.

After that you can take a look at the Quick Start section to start writing your first code. Don’t forget to keep the Migration Guide at hand for when you don’t understand something. It will definitely help you out.

If you prefer to dive straight in, there are some Examples available and you can dig through the API Reference. Some pages have “Click Me” sections which give you an in-depth explanation about the code.