Beyond-All-Reason

Open source RTS game built on top of the Recoil RTS Engine

Where to download

https://www.beyondallreason.info/download

How to play

https://www.beyondallreason.info/guides

Development Quick Start

Beyond All Reason (BAR), consists of 2 primary components, the lobby (Chobby - https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/BYAR-Chobby) and the game code itself (this repository).

The game runs on top of the Recoil engine https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring.

In order to develop the game (this repository) you first need a working install of the lobby/launcher. There are 2 ways to do this:

1. Download the full BAR application from the website and run it. This is probably what you will have done if you have previously installed and played the game.

2. OR if you want to develop the lobby client, follow the guide in the Chobby README. First download a release of Chobby and then launch Chobby, this will automatically download and install the engine and other dependencies.

Once you have a working install of BAR you need a local development copy of the game code to work with. This code will live in the BAR install directory.

1. To find the BAR install directory simply open the launcher (not full game) and click the "Open install directory" button. This is one of the 3 buttons (Toggle log and Upload log are the other 2). For Windows installs this might be your user's AppData/Local/Programs/Beyond-All-Reason/data directory.

2. In the BAR install directory create the empty file devmode.txt. E.g: AppData/Local/Programs/Beyond-All-Reason/data/devmode.txt

3. In the BAR install directory in the data folder in the games sub-directory (create games if it doesn't exist) clone the code for this repository into a directory with a name ending in .sdd. For example:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/Beyond-All-Reason.git BAR.sdd

Ensure that you have the correct path by looking for the file Beyond-All-Reason/data/games/BAR.sdd/modinfo.lua

4. Now you have the game code launch the full game from the launcher as normal. Then go to Settings > Developer > Singleplayer and select Beyond All Reason Dev.

5. Now you can launch a match normally through the game UI. This match will use the dev copy of the LUA code which is in BAR-install-directory/data/games/BAR.sdd.

6. If developing Chobby also clone the code into the games directory. Follow the guide in the Chobby README.

7. (Optional, Advanced) If you want to run automated integration tests, see the testing documentation

More on the .sdd directory to run raw LUA and the structure expected by Spring Engine is documented here.

---

Automated Testing

Prereqs

Lua 5.1

debian/linux

sudo apt install -y lua5.1

windows (MSYS2 UCRT64)

pacman -S --needed mingw-w64-ucrt-x86_64-lua51

macOS

brew install lua@5.1

Lux Package Manager Follow the Lux Getting Started Guide.

Or follow the Cargo instructions to manually build on the Lux Github

Install Project Packages

From the repo root (where lux.toml lives):

lux --max-jobs=2 update

Note: in my testing --max-jobs was super specific to my machine and anything above that number would sometimes cause deadlocks.

Running Tests

Run the full suite (via Busted):

# preferred for predictable CLI behavior
busted

Filter by tag:

busted -t focus

Optionally, run through Lux’s wrapper:

lx test
# run the emmylua type check
lx check
# or to drop into a shell so you can run `busted` manually
lx shell --test
busted
8 successes / 0 failures / 0 errors / 0 pending : 0.246881 seconds

See Lux Guides for more information.

Inspect objects inline while debugging:

print(VFS.Include("inspect.lua")(someObject))

VS Code Test Switcher (optional)

This handy plugin lets you switch between the test and the code-being-tested just by tapping Cmd+Shift+Y.

VSCode Plugin: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=bmalehorn.test-switcher

Then open User Settings (JSON) and add:

"test-switcher.rules": [
    {
        "pattern": "spec/(.*)_spec\\.lua",
        "replacement": "$1.lua"
    },
    {
        "pattern": "spec/builder_specs/(.*)_spec\\.lua",
        "replacement": "spec/builders/$1.lua"
    },
    {
        "pattern": "spec/builders/(.*)\\.lua",
        "replacement": "spec/builder_specs/$1_spec.lua"
    },
    {
        "pattern": "(luarules|common|luaui|gamedata)/(.*)\\.lua",
        "replacement": "spec/$1/$2_spec.lua"
    }
],