Slick 2D Maven Distribution

The fastest and simplest way to start a new Slick 2D based game.

Quickstart

Pre-requisites:

Git, Java and Maven working
Slick 2D depends on jnlp.jar which ships with the "Demo and Samples" package of the JDK. This package must be installed to build the project. With Java 6 it's a box to tick when installing the JDK, and with Java 7 it's a separate download.
Won't work with OpenJDK for the reason above (Can be solved by providing jnlp.jar separately)

Clone and build the project (once)

git clone git://github.com/nguillaumin/slick2d-maven.git
cd slick2d-maven
mvn clean install

Create a Slick 2D game

cd /home/<user>/projects/   -or-   cd C:\Users\<user>\Projects\

# You can omit the last 4 parameters for interactive mode
mvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.slick2d -DarchetypeArtifactId=slick2d-basic-game-archetype -DarchetypeVersion=2013.04-SNAPSHOT -DgroupId=com.me.game -DartifactId=game -Dversion=0.0.1-SNAPSHOT -Dpackage=com.me.game

cd game
mvn clean package

You'll end up with a packaged game in target/game-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-release.zip. Just unzip and run game.sh (Linux) or game.bat (Windows). Alternatively, files are also available unzipped in target/game-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT-release/.

Run/Debug from Eclipse

Configuration-free with the awesome Maven Natives plugin ! Just hit the "Run" button !

Manual steps:

You must have the Maven Eclipse integration plugin installed (m2e)
Import the Maven project
Right-click on Game, Debug as, Java application
This will fail with java.lang.UnsatifsiedLinkError
Run mvn package once, the native libraries will get copied in target/natives
Edit your debug configuration (menu Run, Debug configurations...), on the "Arguments" tab, "VM Arguments" field, enter -Djava.library.path=target/natives
Click on "Debug" and you're all set !

Why ?

I believe making Slick 2D available through Maven will make life easier for users:

Clear versionning scheme
Very easy quickstart using Maven archetypes (see above)
Simplified dependency management, especially for the native libraries
Simplified game packaging

Why not submit a patch to switch Slick 2D to Maven ?

Slick 2D is currently using Ant for building and unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much interest in switching to Maven, despite numerous posts in the forums as well as some pull request on the Slick 2D repo to implement that switch.

I've already tried, and I'll try again :) I hope that this project will convince the Slick 2D maintainers that switching Maven is worth it.

How ?

A Jenkins instance polls the upstream Slick2D Mercurial repository. As soon as a change is committed it merges it to this project using the custom script src/main/scripts/sync-upstream.sh, then commit the changes and pushes them to GitHub.

What's next ?

Update the archetype to produce WebStart artifacts (JNLP)
Define a release scheme
...and the most important end-goal: Get those artifacts into Maven Central to avoid requiring people to clone the project.

akiwarheit / slick2d-maven