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 javaws.jar which ships with the Oracle JDK (It's not available in the public Maven repositories). The pom.xml file references a local filesystem path to javaws.jar for that reason.
• It won't work with OpenJDK for the reason above (Can be solved by providing javaws.jar separately). On some Linux distributions you can install Netx and change the system path to point to netx.jar. For example on Ubuntu the package to install is icedtea-netx-common and the jar is in /usr/share/icedtea-web/netx.jar.

Create a Slick 2D game

The command below is using archetypeVersion=1.0.0. Make sure you use the latest available version from Maven central

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=1.0.0 -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

Upstream

It seems that the upstream Slick2D Mercurial repository is not updated any more, despite numerous bug reports and pull requests. Because of that, I'm now accepting patches that I'll integrate and release through Maven. I guess you could consider this project a fork of the official sources.