Lace

• Provides a set of general Ada components intended to ease the development of game, simulation and GUI Ada applications.
• Components range from low-level ('events' and 'math') to high-level ('game engine').
• Potential applications areas include: 3d simulations, games, visualisations and editors.
• Supports distributed applications (DSA - see Annex E of the Ada Language Reference Manual).
• Portable across desktop and embedded platforms.
• Portable across OS platforms.
• Requires an Ada12 compiler.
• Requires an implementation of the Ada POSIX API (i.e. FLORIST).
• Several additional components are in a private prototype repository.
• Main idea is to tidy/add each private component, in turn, beginning with the base tier.

Content

• Components are organised into dependency tiers.

• Each component in a tier can only depend on components in lower tiers.

• Diagram: 'lace/document/components/lace-components.png'.

Tier	Component	Description
5 ~ Top	User Applet	The user application.
4 ~ High	gel	Game Engine Library.
3 ~ Mid	opengl	OpenGL rendering support (2D/3D).
	physics	Physics space/dynamics support (2D/3D).
2 ~ Low	collada	Provides a Collada parser.
1 ~ Base	lace	Provides core types and a namespace for the Lace package family.
	lace/events	Provides an event mechanism for event-driven applets.
	math	Provides core math functionality.
	xml	Provides a simple XML parser.

Lace/Events additionally:

• Provides Subject/Observer and Event/Response abstractions.
• Is task safe.
• Supports DSA.
• See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_architecture
• and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_programming

Installation

The development packages for the following projects need to be installed on your OS.

• Bullet3d
• Florist/aShell (for 'Lace.Environ' only)
• Freetype
• Expat
• SDL

Example for Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install libbullet-dev libflorist2016-dev libfreetype6-dev libexpat1-dev libsdl2-dev

Adding the following lines to ~/.bashrc (or equivalent) will set the GPR_PROJECT_PATH for all gnat project files:

export opengl_profile=desk
export opengl_platform=glx
export restrictions=xgc
export OS=Linux
export FLORIST_BUILD=default

export LACE=/path/to/lace
source $LACE/lace-gpr_paths.sh

Of course, substitute '/path/to/lace' with the actual path you use.

This should allow any Lace component to be 'with'ed in a user applications gnat project file.

Lace/openGL contains a set of assets (fonts, shaders, etc). These need to be available in each openGL demo folder.

• $ cd $LACE/3-mid/opengl/applet
• $ sudo cp create_opengl_assets.sh /usr/local/bin

Lace/mmi contains a set of assets (fonts, etc). These need to be available in each mmi demo folder.

• $ cd $LACE/4-high/gel/applet
• $ sudo cp create_gel_assets.sh /usr/local/bin

Testing

• $ cd $LACE/4-high/gel/applet/demo/sprite/mixed_shapes
• $ create_opengl_assets.sh
• $ create_gel_assets.sh
• $ gprbuild -P mixed_shapes.gpr
• $ ./launch_mixed_shapes

... or ...

• $ cd $LACE/4-high/gel/applet/demo/skinning/rig/human_rig
• $ create_opengl_assets.sh
• $ create_gel_assets.sh
• $ gprbuild -P human_rig_demo.gpr
• $ ./launch_human_rig_demo golfer