A Sprite Engine…from a Slightly Different Point of View
Kyra is a simple, fully featured, industrial strength Sprite
engine written in C++. It is built on top of SDL and has been
tested on Windows and Linux. It is provided for Open Source
development under the QPL.
What is a Sprite Engine?
A Sprite Engine is the drawing and rendering component of 2D
and quasi-3D games. Examples of this kind of game are
Civilization, Donkey Kong (classic arcade), Pharaoh, Zeus, Warcraft,
Diablo, Frogger, and Pirates!, among many others. It is so called because the “characters” or “little men” are referred to
as “sprites”.
Simple and Easy to Use.
Kyra has a clean and simple C++ interface. Or at least as simple
as an engine can be. It comes with several examples to get you
started, as well as full documentation for the API and
the tool chain.
Fully Featured.
It is fully featured, supporting top-down, side, and isometric rendering. It supports the ‘Sprite’ as its basic type, but also supports Tiles and user-drawn Canvases.
Industrial Strength.
Kyra has a complete tool chain including a sprite editor and
encoder. It’s fast and capable, with specialized code for
rendering and rectangle updates.
…From a Slightly Different Point of View.
But Kyra does some things differently. It supports color
transformations and alpha blending (!). All objects in Kyra
are inserted into a containment hierarchy, and children
are transformed by their parents. So a complex object can be
moved simply by changing the coordinates of the top level
object, and color transformations and alpha transformations
work the same way. The alpha blending can be applied at
a per-image or per-pixel level.