SpatialOS C++ Blank project

This is a SpatialOS project which can serve as a template for building SpatialOS workers using the C++ SDK. It uses CMake as the build system. If you're new to SpatialOS, have a look at Introduction to the C++ worker SDK.

About managed and external workers

Have a look at the Glossary entry for Workers for a complete discussion and examples.

Quick start

The build scripts for each project:

Generate C++ code from schema
Download the C++ worker SDK
Create a cmake_build directory in the worker directory
Invoke cmake with arguments depending on the target platform

To build and launch a local deployment execute the following commands. The target platform is one of windows, linux or macos. Set it based on your development environment:

spatial worker build --target=<platform>
spatial local launch

To connect a new instance of the external C++ worker:

spatial local worker launch External local

What the project does

It's a blank project so the short answer is - not much. The snapshot file in this project contains a single entity with an ACL which matches the Managed worker attributes. When you launch a deployment, a single instance of the Managed worker will be started as configured in default_launch.json.

After connecting successfully both the Managed and External workers log a message to SpatialOS which should be displayed in the output of spatial local launch as it's running. Then they just spin in a loop processing the Ops list.

When SpatialOS disconnects a worker, a message is written to the console output of the worker and it exits with an error status.

Instances of the External worker won't have any entities added to their view because they don't have write access to anything in the snapshot.

Project structure

The CMake project hierarchy doesn't exactly match the directory structure of the project. For example the projects for workers add as subdirectories the schema and dependencies projects.

This is how projects are structured in the directory:

+-- schema/CMakeLists.txt
+-- dependencies/CMakeLists.txt
+-- workers
    |-- External/
    |   |-- External/CMakeLists.txt
    |   |-- CMakeLists.txt
    |   |-- build.json
    |-- Managed/
        |-- Managed/CMakeLists.txt
        |-- CMakeLists.txt
        |-- build.json

This enables you to keep the worker directories free of CMake files for schema and dependencies while not needing a CMake file at the root of the project.

The schema directory contains a sample empty component called blank. It is not used by the workers directly so feel free to delete it but it's there to show how sources generated from the schema could be linked in the worker binary. See schema/CMakeLists.txt which creates a library with all generated sources.

The worker project

The following applies to both the Managed and External worker projects but examples will only be about Managed.

After running spatial build the generated project by CMake will be in workers/Managed/cmake_build. Exactly what it contains will depend on the generator you use. A worker project includes 3 subdirectories in its CMakeLists.txt - dependencies, schema and Managed. The first two are not true subdirectories of workers/Managed in the file structure but their binary directories are set as if they were.

Attaching a debugger

If you use a Visual Studio generator with CMake, the generated solution contains several projects to match the build targets. You can start a worker from Visual Studio by setting the project matching the worker name as the startup project for the solution and navigating to Properties > Configuration properties > Debugging to set the command arguments. Using receptionist localhost 7777 DebugWorker as the command arguments for example will connect a new instance of the worker named DebugWorker via the receptionist to a local running deployment. You can do this for both worker types that come with this project. Make sure you are starting the project using a local debugger (e.g. Local Windows Debugger).

Cloud deployment

As usual set the project_name field in spatialos.json to match your SpatialOS project name. Then upload and launch:

spatial cloud upload <AssemblyName>
spatial cloud launch <AssemblyName> default_launch.json <deploymentname>

See spatial cloud connect external if you want to connect to a cloud deployment. In addition, the External worker has a second external launch configuration called cloud which could be used to connect provided that you know the deployment name and have a login token:

spatial local worker launch External cloud <deployment-name> <login-token>

Integrating with an existing project

If you have an existing project, to add a new C++ worker to it:

Decide whether the worker you're adding will be used as a managed or external worker.
Copy the corresponding directory (e.g. workers/Managed) into the workers directory of your existing project.
In the worker project CMakeLists.txt set SCHEMA_SOURCE_DIR and WORKER_SDK_DIR to point to the CMake projects in your project that generate the corresponding targets and if the targets have different names from Schema and WorkerSdk also rename those.
Add it to the workers definition in your SpatialOS launch configuration (e.g. default_launch.json)

If you don't want to follow the steps manually, use worker_create.sh which will copy and rename the required files. Feel free to modify this script to suit your needs.

Release notes

The following are versions of SpatialOS with the changes to this project listed.

12.0.0

Use worker::ComponentRegistry where required.
Add worker_create.sh to make it easier to create C++ workers in other projects from these templates.
Set is_connected flag based on connection state.

11.0.1

Initial release.

anne-edwards / CppBlankProject