| PackageDescription | The WorldForge client entity library
Eris is designed to simplify client development (and avoid repeating the
same work several times), by providing a common system to deal with the
back end tasks. Notably, Eris encapsulates most of the work in getting
Atlas entities available on your client, logging into a server, and
managing updates from the server. Thus it can be considered as a session
layer above Atlas, providing persistent (for the session) objects as
opposed to Atlas ones (which are transient). It handles the client-side
implementation of the meta-server protocol, and querying game servers;
out-of-game (OOG) operations (via the Lobby and Rooms), and most
important in-game (IG) operations such as entity creation, movement and
updates.
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Eris provides a generic 'Entity' class, which you are free to sub-class
and provide to the system (by registering a factory with the World);
thus you are free to create different classes to handle characters,
walls, vehicles, etc as your client dictates. An alternative approach is
to simply create peer classes, and connect them to Eris via
callbacks. Eris makes extensive use of libSigC++, which must be
correctly installed and functioning on your system. Familiarity with
signal/slot programming concepts is essential for using Eris; the
libSigC++ home-page has some examples. Gtk+ or QT signal systems also
provide a good introduction. |