Allegro Con Eiffel[ Home Page ] [ Eiffel Archive ] [ Eiffel Classes and Clusters ]
Allegro Con EiffelWritten by Peter Monks.
ace01b.zip (659,315 bytes)
ACE (Allegro Con Eiffel) is a port of the excellent Allegro game programming library to the SmallEiffel Eiffel compiler.
ACE is in the public domain. It may be changed, sold, eaten or used in any other manner you see fit.
If you find it useful, however I wouldn't mind hearing from you and comparing notes, and if you use it in a program, I wouldn't mind having my name listed somewhere in the credits. You are free, however, to use it however you want.
Note that the above copyright DOES NOT apply to DJGPP, SmallEiffel or Allegro. You MUST read the copyright notices of each of these packages before you use ACE.
Working installations of the following packages:
In addition, the Allegro library file (LIBALLEG.A) must be copied to the LIB directory within your DJGPP directory hierarchy (the makefile for Allegro v2.2 does this automatically).
Most importantly, thanks to Shawn Hargreaves (shawn@talula.demon.co.uk) for creating the truly excellent Allegro library. Allegro is swap-ware, and ACE is my gift to Shawn.
In addition, many other people helped me in getting this project finished:
This document does not need to be read if all you plan to do is use ACE in your own projects. It merely aims to spell out the requirements I set myself in order to determine which of many possible designs was most appropriate.
If you find this document boring and irrelevant, my apologies, and I hope you find ACE convenient to use as it stands. If, however, you don't like something about ACE, please read the following to try to understand what drove me to design it the way I did, and then help me to make it better, by suggesting changes to either the requirements, the design, or the implementation.
I've also tried to evaluate whether I've been successful at meeting each of these criteria, and identified areas where ACE still needs work.
ACE will probably be in beta until I'm convinced no one (including me) has any more criticisms!
When I started this project I was mainly concerned with producing something that worked, regardless of the techniques used to develop it. Needless to say, I ended up with something that, although it worked, was awful to maintain, and even worse to use.
Still, this initial prototype proved that what I wanted to do was possible, and also made me focus on what I actually wanted the package to provide (i.e. come up with requirements for ACE).
There are still some hints of this initial prototype hanging around, despite my best efforts to get rid of them. If you spot one of these little nasties, please get in touch, so I can get rid of it.
1. I didn't want to change either Allegro, SmallEiffel or DJGPP. I wanted ACE to work with the "off-the-shelf" versions of these packages so that future releases don't break the ACE package.
Result:
Through the use of the support routines (found in the SUPPORT directory), I feel I've been pretty successful at meeting this criteria. I've been through two releases of Allegro and four releases of SmallEiffel, and very little has needed fixing because of these releases (although SmallEiffel v-0.86 broke a lot of things because it is a little buggy under DOS).
2. I wanted the ACE library to be as "clean" an OO design as the underlying procedural library allowed. This meant adherence to the concept of "Design by Contract", and the liberal use of assertions, amongst other things.
Result:
I think I've made a decent first attempt at a "nice" OO design for the library. There are many inter-dependencies between classes that aren't particularly nice, but that's the nature of Allegro. The biggest problem, however, is my very limited OO design experience, so I can't really identify where I've made an OO design blunder.
Take, for example, the concept of "command-query separation". I've heard a lot of people talking about how good it is, and I can guess what it is and what its advantages are from its name, but I really don't _know_ anything about it! Thus, I'm hoping for lots of (constructive!) criticism about ACE's design.
3. I wanted to encapsulate as much of the Allegro functionality as possible.
Result:
I've been able to package up most of the 2D, sound and input functionality, but none of Allegro's 3D capabilities. I have a very limited understanding of 3D graphics, so I felt it was a bit beyond me to try to encapsulate it. Your help could change this!GUI functions are not yet supported. I think this functionality could be included in ACE, through the use of the CECIL library. I've got CECIL working (check out FILE_ITERATOR.E to see a working C callback), but need to really sit down and nut out how the Allegro GUI system works before committing to a design approach.
4. I wanted to ensure that everyone, no matter how rich or poor could use the package.
Result:
Because of the generosity of such people as Shawn Hargreaves, DJ Delorie and Dominique Colnet, the Internet community has access to a wide variety of free products of *excellent* quality. We should all be supremely grateful for the effort these (and others) put into their free products. Certainly without their efforts, ACE wouldn't exist!
5. I'm sure there were others, but they escape me right now! :-)
If you have any problems, comments, grievances etc. about ACE I want to hear about them!! At least then I'll know that this little project was worth the time I spent on it.
Since I move around a bit, e-mail is the only reliable way to get in contact with me. My address is pmonks@iname.com.
Happy Eiffeling!
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