PlayN

• PlayN is a multi-platform based solution for N >= 5 platforms, based on Java and proposed by Google/GWT team.
• Home page http://code.google.com/p/playn/wiki/GettingStarted

Learning

• Lab Macambira tutorials on PlayN and Pet:
  • Part 1 http://youtu.be/SR4dTddWcFw - overview of PlayN
  • Part 2 http://youtu.be/Y1fA69EKfRU - generic workflows in PlayN
  • Part 3 http://youtu.be/veCo81CtCqM - our workflows for Pet, a run-through of the code, and Git, Trac, AA.
• Basics for working under Eclipse: https://youtu.be/Yn_t6E2ztvA
• The usual guide is very good: http://code.google.com/p/playn/wiki/GettingStarted
• Look at demos in playn-samples and tripleplay
• Also look at some simple but useful demos at https://code.google.com/p/playn/wiki/DemoLinks
• Look at a standalone Reversi example which usesPlayN + Nexus[1]. Though this lacks a step-by-step tutorial, it is example code for a simple, fully working game.

Notes on the Actual Learning Path

• I had to install maven 3 from source in ubuntu 11.10
• To change the size of the game window, I had to edit the backend of each platform in order to insert specific code

Notes

• To deploy to Google app engine (GAE)
  • It is important to indicate an available GAE SDK (usually behind the official)
  • When following the instructions in http://code.google.com/p/playn/wiki/GettingStarted, it may be necessary to run mvn install first prior to the mvn -f html/pom.xml gae:run
• Java 7 is required (Java 6 gives compilation errors on OSX Mavericks as of Dec 9 2013)

Developing PlayN itself / Using latest libs

• download playn from git

git clone https://code.google.com/p/playn/

• inside playn type

mvn compile
mvn install

• then repeat this for tripleplay and react (see below)
• to use these development snapshots into your project, make sure to update the playn version in the pom.xml
• you can check that the latest version is available by looking into your local repo like so:

cd ~/.m2
find . -name '*playn*'

• to see what versions of playn are available in the official repositories, search in google for "playn maven repository", then click on the playn-core package to see the available versions. Usually the SNAPSHOT suffix will be reserved for the local git snapshots so they don't conflict with the remote repos.

PlayN development repo

Currently PlayN development of new features is being heavily done in SEGA Threerings' fork of playn. So in order to run the latest tripleplay and react lib, you'll often have to resort to the master branch of threerings. Do this inside your playn git repository:

git remote add ooo git://github.com/threerings/playn.git
git fetch ooo
git checkout remotes/ooo/master
git checkout -b ooo-master
mvn clean compile
mvn install

Then proceed to recompile and install tripleplay and react, then your game should be using the new stuff.

Threerings' Tripleplay

git clone git://github.com/threerings/tripleplay.git
cd tripleplay
mvn compile
mvn install

Threerings' React

git clone git://github.com/threerings/react.git
cd react
mvn compile
mvn install

Testing

Testing without compiling everything

If what you would like to do is to run just the test phase of the lifecycle without running all of the previous phases (eg, compilation of all packages) you could call the goal that is bound to the test phase:

mvn surefire:test

or if you want to run just one test

mvn -Dtest=NameOfTest surefire:test

The above works for my project Pet on core for fast testing, but also on the basedir if you first do an 'mvn install'.

Sometimes I also just go into the toplevel pom.xml file and exclude under development (experimental) files from the build cycle entirely

       <plugin>
         ...
         <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
         ...
         <configuration>
         ...
            <excludes>
             <exclude>**/PetOld.java</exclude>
             <exclude>**/PetWorld.java</exclude>
           </excludes>
         ...
         </configuration>
         ...

Trying things out

• Beanshell java interpreter is cool for testing ideas / language features out

Tips

• Maven output colorization https://github.com/builddoctor/maven-antsy-color

See also

• GT-Games: more game development at our lab
• Mac article for our setup in Mac OS X
• Community wiki with a number of practical tips [2]