How to setup a Development Environment

If you are interested in contributing to flare with code, you probably need to start flare quite a few times. This page tries to explain how this can be easily done.

Flare is just the engine, so you will additionally need actual game content to test your changes on. Engine changes will very likely require game data changes as well. Think of adding new files or attributes to files. So you want to easily be able to modify the engine and recompile it and also you want to easily change content of a game to run your modified engine with the modified game.

Have a look at page "Directory structure of flare" (to be written, instead read https://github.com/flareteam/flare-engine/issues/568)

For easy developing you certainly don't want to install the game data on each change again, but rather start the engine pointing to your local changes in your home directory. The local mods are stored at

~/.local/share/flare/gamename/mods/

whereas gamename is describing the game which is played, such as flare-game or polymorphable The default is default. So if you just invoke your modified newly compiled flare via ./flare in your engines git repository it will look for

~/.local/share/flare/default/mods/

You could just use ./flare --game=yourfavoritegame, however it may be lots of typing. So to make it really easy make a symlink at ~/.local/share/flare/gamename/mods/ pointing to the mods folder of your favorite game you develop on.