GNE Tutorials

NOTE! The tutorals have not been updated since GNE 0.55. I will try to update them soon, but I will be going on vacation until September 2003, so they may not be updated for a few weeks.

These GNE tutorials are meant to act as a starting point from which to start building your first programs with GNE. Before you begin the first tutorial I will mention some of the other places to get help for GNE:

• The reference documentation (generated by the Doxygen program) is meant to be the primary and definitive documentation for GNE, but unfortunately is most useful only after you have gotten at least a basic feel for the library (and this is what these tutorials are for ;). This documentation is found by one of three ways:
  • Through the online doxygen at the main GNE website.
  • Through the downloadable pre-generated docs at the main download site.
  • Through building the documents from the source code using Doxygen.
• Through the project mailing lists, available on the SourceForge project site.
• Through the examples included in your examples directory.

Installing GNE

Each of the GNE tutorials assumes that you have successfully installed the GNE library, and know how to link it in using compiler specific settings. Help on installing GNE and using it with your specific compiler is found in the installation tutorials.

Prerequisites

These tutorials assume that you have a decent understanding of object oriented C++ concepts:

• inheritance
• polymorphism (virtual functions)
• namespaces

These concepts are also nice to know, as they are used somewhat in GNE, but their usage is either light or simple enough to pick up easily enough to use them at their required level with GNE.

• Exceptions
• RAII and smart pointers

You should also know the basics behind multithreaded applications -- in particular you should be familiar with the concept of a thread, and how to use basic mutexes. There is a site which will explain these concepts. GNE's threading API uses pthreads in UNIX, and native threads in Windows, but favors the pthreads concepts and semantics. Pay particular attention to threads, mutexes, and condition variables.

Contents:

1. Creating exhello last updated for GNE 0.70 on 8/26/2003
   This is the first place to start if you haven't used GNE before. This tutorial is VERY LARGE, and it is so large because it explains all of the basic concepts behind GNE. The other tutorials assume some sort of knowledge with GNE and will explain only smaller, focused parts of GNE and how to use them specifically.
2. Network Game Programming Techniques using PacketFeeder (8/16/2002)
   I wrote this tutorial to help explain part about how I thought GNE would be used (at least by me). This tutorial was written just recently. I'm not sure I like it all that well, so if you read it, let me know how you feel about it.