melonJS - a fresh & lightweight 2D sprite-based engine

Copyright (C) 2011 - 2013, Olivier Biot, Jason Oster

melonJS is licensed under the MIT License

About melonJS

melonJS is the result of our enthusiasm & experiments with Javascript, and currently features :

• A fresh & lightweight 2D sprite-based engine
• Standalone library (does not rely on anything else, except a HTML5 capable browser)
• Compatible with most major browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, IE)
• Multiple Audio Channel support
• Basic physics & collision mechanisms (to ensure low cpu requirements)
• Basic Vector Math
• Tween Effects
• Transition effects
• A basic set of Object Entities (to be extended)
• Object Pooling
• Basic animation management
• Standard pritesheet and Packed Textures (Texture Packer) support
• A state manager (to easily manage loading, menu, options, in-game state)
• Tiled map format version +0.9.x integration for easy level design
  • Uncompressed Plain, Base64, CSV and JSON encoded XML tilemap loading
  • Orthogonal tilemap with built-in collision management
  • Isometric, Perspective tilemap support
  • Multiple layers (multiple background/Foreground, collision and Image layers)
  • Multiple Tileset support
  • Tileset Transparency settings
  • Layers Alpha settings
  • Tiled Objects
  • Flipped & rotated Tiles
  • Dynamic Layer and Object/Group ordering
  • Dynamic Entity loading
  • Solid, Platform, Slope and Breakable Tiles
• System & bitmap fonts
• Mouse and Touch device support (with mouse emulation)
• Built-in support for cocoonJS
• Asynchronous messaging support (minPubSub)
• some basic GUI elements
• a customizable loader, etc...

Building melonJS

To build your own version of melonJS you will need to install :

• the Node.js package manager
• the Grunt task manager

Once the Node.js package manager has been installed (using the installer from their website), we need to install Grunt and the Grunt CLI (Command Line Interface), by doing the following :

Open a Terminal or a Commmand Prompt and type the following :

$ npm install -g grunt-cli

then we can install the melonJS required dependencies, by typing :

$ cd melonJS
$ npm install

Once all the above done, we are ready to build melonJS :

$ cd melonJS
$ grunt

Both plain and minified library will be available under the "build" directory.

Building the documentation

melonJS uses JSDoc3, the documentation processor, and requires Java to be installed. JSDoc also requires specific dependencies to be installed :

$ cd melonJS
$ cd tasks
$ cd jsdoc
$ npm install

Then do the following to actually build the documentation :

$ cd melonJS
grunt doc

The generated documentation will be then available under the "docs" directory

Using melonJS

Follow the tutorial here to get started !

Note that due to the 'cross-origin request' policy implemented in most browsers (that prevents from accessing local files), you will need to either disable this security check (see the tutorial), or better use a "personal" local web server.

Questions, need help ?

If you need help, you can try the melonJS developer forum, or in #melonjs on irc.freenode.net. For any other questions, feel free to send us an email.