Getting Started with Mappy

Getting Started with Mappy

pkrcel

Member #14,001

February 2012

I might add my 2cents here, but anyone says that this could be left as a "long term project" is right in saying so, 'casue if you go on in programming and gain experience you'll invariably end up in NEEDING to do so sooner rather than later.

Nevertheless, I support the idea that knowing how to properly build a library you might want to use alongside your program is one of the FIRST steps you should dive into, not something you should be doing "later".

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Mark Oates

Member #1,146

March 2001

Maybe I should set aside a week where I just build random projects.

I built the tmx library, but it took me a good 6 hours to finally get everything to build properly, mostly because of 1) configuration ambiguities (cmake) and/or 2) dependencies not linking correctly.

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Rodolfo Lam

Member #16,045

August 2015

Yeah, it took me as well around 6 hours... Practice makes perfect, but with libraries each case is different so one never knows what to expect building them.

Fishcake

Member #8,704

June 2007

MaximumCDawg said:

Speaking of, is Mappy really that bad? It's starting to sound like the Tiled fan club up in here. Obviously, if it just doesn't work then I got no option, but still...

My guess is because:

Tiled is open source, while Mappy isn't.
Tiled is completely free, while you need to pay for Mappy's pro version.
It seems that Tiled is still being actively developed (the last release was just a few days ago), while Mappy's website looks so outdated.

As for being on topic:

Quote:

Yeah, I ran across that, but I didn't know what to do with it. I get what Cmake does, conceptually, but I've never used it before. It sounded like I couldn't just plop all the .h and .c files into my project, include them, and go.

You don't actually have to use CMake if you don't want to. You can actually just copy the files into you project. But you have to manually setup its dependencies. For example, if you want to use this TMX parser library, copy the src folder into your project. Then you could either:

download the source code for zlib and libxml2, and put both of them into your project as well, or
download the binary of zlib and libxml2, and configure your project to link them.

And since you're using Visual Studio, you could also just use Nuget and add zlib and libxml2 as your project dependencies, and build away.

It's a lot of work, and you probably have to tinker around for a while to get it to work. But like pkrcel said:

pkrcel said:

... knowing how to properly build a library you might want to use alongside your program is one of the FIRST steps you should dive into, not something you should be doing "later".