wallabra / ut432-headers-meson

Unreal Tournament v432 public header convenience files for Meson projects.

Unreal Tournament 432 Public Headers for Meason

Overview

This is a Meson subproject tree that allows other Meson projects to utilize the Unreal Tournament v432 sources publicly released by Epic as a dependency.

Quick-Start

Getting

To add this project to your Meson project as a subproject, simply use a ut432.wrap file inside a subprojects/ subdirectory of your project root. Wrap files are remarkably simple, and in this case three lines suffice.

For instance:

[wrap-git]
url = https://github.com/Gustavo6046/ut432-headers-meson
revision = head

Still, for your convenience, a wrapfile is already provided as ut432-headers.wrap, which you can even download using a simple command like:

curl -osubprojects/ut432-headers.wrap https://github.com/Gustavo6046/ut432-headers-meson/raw/master/ut432-headers.wrap

Using

In order to use the Unreal Tournament 432 public headers in your project, you declare the subproject in yourmeson.build file and simply extract its dependency accordingly.

Here's an example of a very simple meson.build file that builds only a single, hypothetical C++ class as a native UnrealScript class:

# Builds MyNativeFoo.so with a native class
# MyNativeFoo.MyFoo

project('MyNativeFoo', 'cpp')

ut432 = subproject('ut432')
ut432_dep = ut432.get_variable('ut432_dep')

shared_library('MyNativeFoo',
    'MyFoo.cpp',
    dependencies: ut432_dep
)

Background

Unreal Tournament was a first-person shooter video game released in 1999 for personal computers of the era. It quickly became a very big hit worldwide, what with its fun and varied gameplay, its greatly improved multiplayer performance, and its higher tolerance to lower-grade hardware of the era, qualities which fiercely rivaled and even oftentimes surpassed those of its competitor from id Software, Quake III Arena.

One of the things that set Unreal Tournament apart from other PC games of the era was its extensibility and ease of modding. Epic Games were generous with its community back then, providing a full-blown level editor that in fact came with the game itself. The Unreal Editor allowed all sorts of people, even those who had little to no experience in actual programming, to dabble into level design.

The Unreal Editor was one of the main early reasons that level design as a trade exists today. This is made clear by the sheer legacy that the Unreal Engine has in the video game scene; even today, newer iterations of the engine are still used to create new titles.

However, the engine 's source code has (so far) never been fully released by Epic Games, unlike most id Software titles, which back then always released the full source code of their games sometime after each game's release, to extend the game's lifespan in the hands of the community. Instead, Epic Games provided a set of public headers, which any modder was free to download and link their C++ code against to use in UnrealScript code, assuming they knew how. But despite the engine remaining proprietary, Epic did not leave this service even half-done: they even included documentation on using those public headers!

In that vein, this project aims to facilitate using those same headers in 2021. It shouldn't be too difficult to do the same for the v469 update public headers once those are released by OldUnreal.

Legal Info

Despite their inclusion in this repository, the authors of it, including the original owner, Gustavo Ramos Rehermann, and any other contributors and/or users, do not claim any ownership whatsoever over the public header files that Epic Games, Inc. has freely distributed to its community over the course of Unreal Tournament's ongoing lifespan.

However, files outside the root/ subdirectory, in particular meson.build, are integral parts of the repository, and licensed under its terms. See LICENSE.md for details.

Note that the LICENSE.md notice only applies to repository-owned files, not to files under Epic Games, Inc.'s ownership (root/); Epic Games is granted the full right to request the repository be taken down or otherwise modified should it not comply with any legal requirements of Epic Games, Inc.'s discretion.

Feel free to contact rehermann6046 AT gmail DOT com for any inquiries and notices, and in fact send any modification or takedown request to that email address, with proof that it was sent by Epic Games, Inc. or a representative thereof, prior to attempting any litigation. Failure to comply with such a request may be used as valid court evidence of an actual unalwful infraction on the part of the project owners.