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If you are a skilled Java programmer (or just learning), you can make your own games and host them on our servers so that others can come and play them at any time. This is accomplished through the use of free software libraries that we provide to handle networking and match-making which are documented below and demonstrated in the sample games.

Contents 1 Download the Toolkit 2 Tutorials 3 Example Games 4 Libraries and Documentation 5 Getting the Source 6 Web Site Source

Download the Toolkit

Download one of the following archives which contain pre-built versions of all of the necessary libraries:

 game-gardens.tar.gz
 game-gardens.zip

Tutorials

The best way to get started is to go through the main tutorial which takes you step by step through the process of implementing the game Reversi using the Game Gardens toolkit:

• Reversi Tutorial

You might also want to check out tutorials on using particular Java IDEs to do your development:

• Running through Eclipse
• Using NetBeans with GameGardens

Then there are a host of other tutorials, covering various topics:

• Compiling and Running the Sample Games
• A thread discussing the Presents distributed object architecture
• Mummichog Design Pattern Tutorial
• See also: a complete list of tutorials

Example Games

Three games are included with the main distribution. Many of the games uploaded to the site come with source code and also serve as good examples:

• Dugi: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dugi-gg
• Mummichog: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mummichog
• Tasty: svn://samskivert.com/games/trunk/tasty
• Tall Tales: svn://samskivert.com/games/trunk/talltales

Libraries and Documentation

The source and documentation for all the libraries used by the Game Gardens system and sample games are provided here:

• Narya library - javadocs
• Nenya library - javadocs
• Vilya library - javadocs
• ToyBox library - javadocs
• samskivert library - javadocs

Getting the Source

The Game Gardens toolkit comes pre-compiled with all of the necessary library dependencies included. You definitely want to start with this before you try rebuilding the toolkit from source code.

Once you're comfortable building things with the pre-compiled toolkit, you might want to check out the source code from Subversion. The Game Gardens toolkit is made up of a number of key libraries called Narya, Nenya, Vilya and Toybox. Those can be checked out from Subversion like so:

 svn checkout svn://code.threerings.net/gardens/trunk gardens

This will checkout the source code to the various libraries used by Game Gardens as well as all of the necessary external library dependencies. The directory structure once you've checked it out will look something like this:

 gardens/projects/narya - the Narya library
 gardens/projects/nenya - the Nenya library
 gardens/projects/vilya - the Vilya library
 gardens/projects/toybox - the ToyBox library
 gardens/projects/samskivert - the samskivert library
 gardens/projects/games - the sample games

You can rebuild all of the dependent libraries and generate the single combined jar file that is used by the game development environment by running (that will not work on a Windows machine):

 cd gardens/
 ant distall

That will create the file:

 gardens/projects/games/client/gg-client.jar

which is what is used when you compile and test your games from:

 gardens/projects/games/yourgame

Note that Windows users will likely want to use a GUI tool (like Tortois SVN).

Web Site Source

If you are interested in checking out the source code to the web applications that are used on this website and the various HTML and whatnot, you can find that here:

• The main website is in Subversion:

 svn checkout svn://code.threerings.net/gardens/trunk gardens

• We also use the mvnForum message board system.

Further questions can comments are best handled on the message boards.