ezRPG Tutorial 1.0.1

[Aventro]

Introduction

ezRPG is a game engine built with modularity in mind. A open-sourced project written in PHP being actively maintained (as we speak). With ezRPG you can quickly get started coding on your game due to the very easy but flexible architecture ezRPG has. You can easily define a functionality, feature, 'game feature' as a module, a module that you can use in any ezRPG powered game you like. This is quite powerful as you can quickly make common features that you can use throughout every game you make. Later in the series we're going to learn everything there is about modules, but for now you could ease your mind with a module being a file that have a responsibility to do and probably present something as well.

The ezRPG engine is written in PHP and depending on what version you decide to use the requirements differ. In this series we're going to use the most stable version 1.0.2.

Installation

As I just mentioned earlier ezRPG is open-sourced, it's free to use and anyone can be contributing to the project it was quite a simple choice to put the ezRPG code on GitHub. We're going to use the latest most stable version 1.0.2, but how do we find it? At a first glance GitHub might feel a bit tricky with all this different things like branches, tags and stuff like that, but it really isn't, once you get it you understand what kind of structure this actually gives and how easily we can maintain different type of versions of ezRPG.

So let's browse away to https://github.com/ezrpg. We're looking to use the 1.0.x so let's click on 'ezrpg-1.0.x' repository. Now we should see some tree structure with different directories and files, it's actually listing all files under the 'master' branch. This is not what we're looking for, because those files may be broken or bugged. Why? Well, that's because the ezRPG team is pushing code updates to that branch which may cause the code it's keeping to have bugs or even be broken, we must get our hands on a stable version and in order to do that we must click on the 'tags' link which is just above the 19 Commits blue text on the right. (Feel like cheating? https://github.com/ezrpg/ezrpg-1.0.x/tags) As we can see there is only one tag available for now and it happens to be the version we're looking for! So let's download that by clicking on either the .zip or tar.gz (which one you feel most comfortable with extracting). Put the contents of the file on your web server/web host.

* C:\wamp\www\ezrpg -> http://localhost/ezrpg/

With the contents extracted we must first give some reading/writing permissions to some files. If you're using WampServer on a Windows local machine you don't need to this.

But make sure these files have read/write permission:

• config.php
  
• smarty/templates_c
  

 

Visit yourgame.com/path/to/ezrpg/install.php. (In my case that's http://localhost/ezrpg/). If you managed to make the steps above correct you should see something like this:

It's kinda self-explanatory click on 'Continue to next step' :rolleyes: If you don't see something above you may have put the files incorrectly, not given the correct permissions or just browsing the wrong web address.

In Three Easy Steps

In the next step it's time to provide ezRPG with our database details. Create a database unless you have one and specify a table prefix if you feel like you need to (i.e. a database that contains multiple applications).

Continue to the next step. (I'm not even sure why I bother to write this part).

On the last step you're making the admin account, you can fill this details quickly if you like to, you can easily change them later. I think there's no validation either so go ahead pick an invalid email if you feel like it because that's the last time you can do that!

Once you've created the Admin account go ahead and click continue.

Click on 'Visit your ezRPG!' and you're done. Make sure you delete the install.php. SUCCESS!

 

Click around and get familiar with what you got in the bare ezRPG installation, in the next tutorial we're going deep in the source and taking a look at the architecture, file structures, modules, templates etc. Let's the ezRPG development begin!

[sniko]

Very nice tutorial! I'll be looking at the source later, and evaluating it for my own purposes. Great job, Aventro!