Photon is an API which is designed primarily to ease creation of hardware
accelerated 2D games with OpenGL and other open source & cross platform
libraries. Photon aims to simplify portable game development, enabling
developers to focus on the gameplay. Photon uses OpenGL for hardware
accelerated rotation, alpha blending, resizing, and drawing. Photon is built
entirely on free software, using libraries like GLFW, PhysFS, OpenAL, and
boost. Using Photon does not require knowledge of any of these libraries as
their needed functionality is wrapped entirely within Photon's rich class
library so that anyone with a decent grasp of C++ can use Photon.
Photon is a cross platform API, designed to run on as many operating systems
as possible, and OS support is only limited by libraries which Photon
depends on, at the moment Photon should run on Windows, Linux, OSX, and
other Operating Systems which have OpenGL support.
http://photon.sourceforge.net is the home page. http://sourceforge.net/projects/photon/ is the project page.
At the moment building photon relies upon SCons. As of Photon 0.0.2 experimental project files are available for Code::Blocks and Dev-C++. Visual C++ project files are a high priority.
Photon only uses free open source libraries, so that by using Photon you are not subjected to any proprietary licensing terms.
When I get to them, I can only work on Photon in my spare time, if you have a specific request let me know and I can give you an estimate of when I plan on getting to it. There's always the option that you help out and then the feature will be added sooner rather than later.
Feel free to contribute to Photon, bugfixes are greatly appreciated. Not all submitted features can be accepted, but I'll usually at least add a link to your submission if it cannot be included in the standard distribution for some reason. (Extensions to Photon which uses non-free or non-portable libraries fall into this category, I appreciate them but usually won't make them part of the standard distribution.)
That depends upon your compiler, generally there are several things that need to be done:
On a command line compiler like g++ this would look something like:
g++ -DPHOTON_USE_OPENAL -c -o test.o test.cpp g++ -o test test.o -lphoton -lglfw -lopenal -lGL -lGLU -lphysfs -lcorona -lfreetype
No. Well not yet, I do have intent to write basic tutorials on using Photon, as well as porting some existing tutorials on various subjects to Photon.
Sure, if you're using it and you feel comfortable admitting that, I admire your honesty. In all seriousness, this is greatly appreciated, and greatly beneficial to the Photon community, the more people using it the more people to help find bugs, suggest features, and maybe some of them will think of something cool to add for the rest of us.
Photon is licensed under a zlib-style license, see LICENSE.html.
First of all, I prefer zlib licensed libraries, as you can see, Photon depends primarily on zlib licensed libraries. I also don't feel that I should try to restrict what people do with Photon, as the people who will try to steal work aren't going to care what license it was under in the first place.
You are allowed to do almost anything you want with Photon including use it in commercial applications.
You cannot claim you wrote it, distribute altered versions that are not clearly marked as such, or remove or alter the license of the Photon source. You also cannot sue me for damages if Photon hurts you, your pet, or your feelings.
Photon used to be ZEngine, but when I decided to do a major rewrite the name changed. I am the author of both ZEngine and Photon, but thank you for your concern.
Photon does practically everything ZEngine did, but is being actively developed. Photon also uses a fairly different design than ZEngine, which I hope most will enjoy.
In case you want to port to a platform with no OpenGL, or maybe you like the letter 'Z' before every class name. If you hate the new style, and would prefer to kick it old school, ZEngine is a fine choice.
Yes, Gewi was the GUI for ZEngine, and was separate from the core of ZEngine. In Photon Gewi will become photon::gui, but is not yet completed. Because of the modular core method and resource management, the inside has been rewritten, and a number of bugs have been fixed. photon::gui will be a major improvement over Gewi.
Sure.. I guess, I'd prefer you donate it to a better project than Photon but if you have to donate money to me because you're using Photon in some amazing application and you feel guilty making millions off of my "hard" work.. email me, I'll try to talk you out of it, or suggest a better use of funds.
Help me out on Photon.. write some documentation, anything, if you're not sure how to help, email me, I'll let you know what needs to be done.
That's a secret right now.
Depending on how much time I have, and how interested I am in the project, maybe. If you want me to work on something I'd love to hear from you, even if I don't have time at the moment. If the project in question uses Photon you get bonus points, but is not a requirement for me to work with you.
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