FlashGameDev / FRESteamWorks

SteamWorks API for AIR applications

Steamworks API for AIR applications

A simple Steamworks API wrapper to be used as native extension for Adobe AIR applications. This allows you to implement Steam achievements, leaderboards, cloud storage, workshop support and much more in your AIR application - on Windows, OS X and Linux.

This project initially started as a fork of FRESteamWorks by Oldes/Amanita Design.

If you want to contribute to this project, please take a look at the contributing guide.

For a list of changes, see the changelog.

Download

Pre-built cross-platform ANEs (for both Windows and OS X), as well as Linux SWCs can be found on http://dump.ventero.de/FRESteamWorks/. The Linux wrapper binary has to be built manually, see the Linux section for more details.

API Documentation

For a full list of all supported functions with some accompanying documentation, see lib/API.txt. In general, the FRESteamWorks API functions try to be a close representation of the native Steamworks SDK functions. Thus, for detailed documentation, see the Steamworks SDK docs.

The objects returned by certain API functions are plain data structures. For a list of available properties, see the corresponding source files.

Usage

For Windows/OS X builds, you'll only have to include the ANE in your project like any normal SWC, add the extension to your application descriptor and include extendedDesktop in the list of supported profiles. For an example, see the application descriptor of the FRESteamWorks test application.

Testing your application is a bit more complicated and depends on how your project is built. For detailed information, see below. For general information regarding the testing of Steam applications, please refer to the Steamworks SDK documentation.

Since the AIR runtime on Linux doesn't support native extensions, an external binary is used to communicate with the Steamworks API. For more information on how to build and include this tool, see the Linux section.

Known Issues

Due to a bug in old versions of the AIR runtime, the runtime will crash as soon as a function is called that returns any of the com.amanitadesign.steam.* objects. For this reason, FRESteamWorks should only be used with AIR runtimes >= 3.7.

Flash Builder 4.6 seems to have an issue with detecting classes that implement interfaces inside an ANE, which results in the FRESteamWorks class not being visible inside the ANE within Flash Builder when using earlier builds (older than v0.4-19) of the ANE. This issue is also fixed in Flash Builder 4.7.

With older versions of the ANE (older than v0.4-19), running an application including that ANE is not possible in Flash Builder 4.6 on OS X. To fix this issue, simply download to a more recent ANE.

Flash Builder

Building

To include the ANE in your Flash Builder project, simply add it to the list of "Native Extensions" under "ActionScript Build Path" in your project's properties. Make sure it gets packaged when building your application by checking the "Package" box in the "Native Extensions" tab under "ActionScript Build Packaging". The extension will automatically be added to your application descriptor, but you still might have to add extendedDesktop to the list of supported profiles.

Running

Since by default, Flash Builder uses its installation path as working directory when running applications, this however isn't enough to test your application in Flash Builder. This can be fixed by either adding the library's directory to the dynamic linker's search path (see the AIR/Flex SDK section on how to do this), or by creating a new shortcut to Flash Builder where the working directory is set to your project's directory and adding the dynamic library to your project (this does not work on OS X).

Packaging

Just include the native Steamworks library at the top level of your project so that it gets included when packaging your application.

AIR/Flex SDK

Building

For projects built with the AIR/Flex SDKs, the ANE can be included by simply adding the ANE path to the external library path (either by adding it to your build config file, or by adding -external-library-path+=/path/to/FRESteamWorks.ane to your mxmlc/compc compiler flags). The SWF you're has to be at least version 11.

Running

To run your application with the AIR Debug Launcher (adl), you will have to first unpack the ANE. To do this, rename FRESteamWorks.ane to FRESteamWorks.zip, then unzip it and rename the generated folder to FRESteamWorks.Unpacked.ane. Now you can add -extdir /path/to/folder to the adl command line flags. Here, folder refers the parent folder of the unzipped extension (i.e. the folder that contains FRESteamWorks.Unpacked.ane).

Since the native library included in the ANE is dynamically linked against the Steamworks library, you'll also have to make sure that the dynamic linker can find the Steamworks library. When testing, this is easiest done by adding the folder containing the Steamworks library to your %PATH% environment variable on Windows (example), DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH on OS X (example) or the library itself to LD_PRELOAD on Linux (example).

Packaging

For packaged builds, you'll simply have to include the native Steamworks libraries in the top level of your build and add the path to a directory containing the FRESteamWorks.ane as -extdir to adt. For an example, see the test application's packaging script.

Flash Professional

Building

First of all, make sure that your project's target is set to "AIR 3.0 for Desktop" (or any more recent AIR version). Then, in the AIR preferences (wrench icon next to target project's target), check the "Extended Desktop" profile and select "Output as: Application with runtime embedded".

To include the ANE, go to the "Advanced ActionScript 3.0 Settings" (wrench icon next to the project's script settings), and in the "Library path" tab, click the native extension button and select FRESteamWorks.ane.

Running

See the Flash Builder section on running the application.

Packaging

See the Flash Builder section on packaging the application.

FDT

FDT is very similar to Flash Builder. The main differences are that the ANE is automatically added to the project and packaged when copying it into the project's lib folder, so that the steps described in Flash Builder's building section are not necessary. However, when adding the native Steamworks libraries, you have to make sure that they're packaged with the application by opening the project's properties and adding them under "FDT AIR Properties" -> "Desktop" -> "Package Contents".

Please also make sure to follow the steps described in the running section to debug your application from within FDT and see the list of known issues.

Linux

The AIR runtime on Linux doesn't support native extensions. Instead, you'll have to compile your AS3 application against FRESteamWorksLibLinux.swc and compile a wrapper binary that handles the communication between AIR and the Steamworks API. For details on how to do that, please contact me directly (email address see profile).

Building FRESteamWorks

There shouldn't be any reason for you to manually build the FRESteamWorks.ane, as pre-built ANEs can be downloaded from http://dump.ventero.de/FRESteamWorks/. If you need a more recent version than the builds that are available on that site, you can create an issue in the bug tracker.

If you still want to build the ANE yourself (or build the test application), a few simple steps have to be followed.

1. Create a config file by copying config_example.sh to config.sh on OS X, or config_example.bat to config.bat and correctly setting up the values within.

2. Open the Visual Studio solution or XCode project (both inside src/) and fix up the include paths (for the Adobe AIR SDK as well as the Steamworks SDK).

3. Build the project in either debug or release mode. This compiles the native library and automatically builds an ANE for the current platform containing that library.

4. Optionally, build the test application by running build.{bat,sh} inside test/bin-debug/ and run it with runMac.sh or runWin.bat. This automatically uses the ANE built in step 3.

To build a cross platform ANE, you'll have to compile the native library on both Windows and OS X and then create an ANE that includes both of those. This is easiest done by first running mkdir.sh in builds/, building FRESteamWorks.dll on Windows, copying it over to the directory created on OS X and then running compile.sh and build.sh in that order.

For more details, please see the contributing guide.

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License

See LICENSE.