vx library
Making games with Verge and Lua even better.
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vx, (preferably pronounced 'vee echs' since it's an acronym -- although 'vex' is okay too) a "[v]erge e[x]tension", attempts to give a sophisticated interface with the free Verge 2D Game Engine. It wraps the raw LuaVerge library that comes with Verge in a more modern, object-oriented approach, to cater to those of us who like lightly sprinkled object-orientation rather than purely procedural code in their Lua programs.
Onne of the Verge engine developers, Overkill (Andrew Crowell), is the creator behind this magical library, so you can be sure it's fairly up-to-date with the engine!
This thing comes with a suite of objects and classes that tidy up Verge projects, plus some other neat and very useful functions. It's also garbage collected! So any resources you no longer need will eventually be removed without the worry or need to explicitly free things (although the option for that is still here).
Once you learn these libraries, I am confident that you can make games in Verge several times faster, and a lot of this has to do with your code being a lot cleaner.
Please read over the next sections for more details!
To start using Verge, just get the latest version of vx. It contains all the library goodies which allow vx to work.
(Note: Verge 3.1 used a different Lua binding. Sadly, vx was made between Verge 3.1 and 3.14, and that version was also called Verge 3.1. So there are a lot of underlying differences. If for some reason, this applies to you, you can get the old version)
There is a bit of setup required to use it with your project, but nothing colossal:
lua 1 is in there somewhere to make Verge run as LuaVerge.
And with that, you should be done! Code a game to your heart's content! Read the tutorials and examples for inspiration.
require "vx"
All the stuff that comes with the vx library is listed under the documentation. There are also some tutorials and examples to help you on your way to make games.
Okay, now that you've got vx, and set it up, you might want to read over this section to get an idea of what sort of things vx gives you. You'll be consulting these sections a lot, to learn all the of large API that vx has. So please tell me if you see anything that seems too vague, or is missing, or has a mistake in it.
Here are the various sections:
Little code snippets that document and explain things about vx.
Please, feel free to add new examples or tutorials to this list. Tack them on here. Fresh examples are what keep people informed and motivated!
If you're curious about Verge, check out this:
Some other useful guides to Lua include the following:
Prod at the documentation to understand what variables, function and objects are in vx, and what attributes and methods belong to each object.
Read the tutorials, and examples above.
Finally, if you have any questions, ask! If you have questions or concerns, go to the help board on http://www.verge-rpg.com/ or join the channel #vergehelp on irc://irc.lunarnet.org/
My email is overkill9999 at gmail dot com. Feel free to fire me a question that way, too.
Are you an capable person who'd like to see Verge (and vx) thrive in making 2D indie games? Then why not help out?
To get the most recent development build of vx, you will probably want a Subversion client (like TortoiseSVN for Windows).
Then checkout this repository using the SVN client.
If you have patches, send them to me! If you're wanting to help maintain, we can see about getting full commit privileges.
vx is still needs better explanations, and more newbie-friendly resource. It needs more examples, better documentation, and tutorials. If you would like to help with any of these tasks, please, by all means do. Talk to me about it so I can put your work here.
To create games with vx is the true way to really get more people interested in adapting to it. I want to eventually put a list of games that specifically use vx here. That way, it demonstrates what can be made, and that both Verge and vx are actually quite lively.
The point of game engines like Verge, and tools like vx are so people make games. So help me show them off!
Know somebody who wants to make a game? Point them to Verge! A fresh community is part of what makes creating games worthwhile.