Pure Power Tactical Engine (in short PPTactical) is a cross-platform 2D engine for real time strategy and real time tactics games.
The engine is currently frozen for major features. However, it's still maintained for minor bug fixes and keeping it up to date with compiler and libraries changes.
The project began as the closed source engine of the first game developed by Piron Games, called Pure Power (1998-2001)
The engine was open-sourced and has been under steady development until its latest stable release, version 0.9.6 (2001-2006)
Refactoring, bug fixes, library and compiler/IDE upgrades were done in 2017 and 2025.
Previous releases of the engine may be found at https://sourceforge.net/projects/pptactical/
A detailed history of the project may be found in doc/PPT Releases.doc
This project uses submodules and they need to be initialized.
After cloning the project, run:
git submodule init
git submodule update
Alternatively, pass --recurse-submodules to git clone (or tick the box in your clone popup if you have a visual git client).
Get a C++ compiler:
- compiler standard is ISO C++11
- the engine has been tested using mingw64 and x86_64-w64 architecture;
- any architecture should be supported though.
Get SDL 2:
- the following libraries are required: SDL 2, SDL2 Image, SDL2 gfx, SDL2 mixer, SDL2 ttf
- make sure you use the libraries compatible with the compiler;
- if using mingw, unpack into lib/SDL2_mingw folder or, if you already have them installed, adjust the paths (include/linker) to your installation.
Get Code::Blocks (optional):
- a project is available in dev/codeblocks/engine_sdl
- if you've installed SDL 2 libraries in another path than lib/SDL2_mingw, please adjust the include and library paths;
- go to Settings -> Compiler -> Global Compiler Settings -> Toolchain executables and set the path to the C++ compiler you're planning to use.
The engine should build with Microsoft C++ toolchain (Visual Studio, Code, etc), but no projects are supplied at this time.
The engine should build and run on all platforms where SDL is supported (Windows, Linux, Unix, etc).
Important
In order to overcome the endianess problem, the Stream_ANSI_C class has been added endian manipulation; since the data files are in little endian format, on big endian platforms conversion on reading basic data types must be performed. To enable endianess conversion, you must set the PPT_BIGENDIAN_IO define.
Important
In order to run, please make sure that these DLLs are present in bin folder or in your path. Please make sure the DLLs are for the correct architecture you're building for (e.g. 64 bit)
cd bin
ls *.dll
SDL2.dll
SDL2_image.dll
SDL2_mixer.dll
SDL2_ttf.dllC++ Builder 11.2 or later is required to build the tools.
A project group to conveniently have all the tools in one place is available here: dev/bcb/tools/PPTacticalEngineTools.groupproj
Build and install the custom components from the PironGamesComponents projects.
Please note that the Map Editor is quite large in lines of code and C++ Builder will display a nagware popup everytime you try to build. Apparently, people at Embarcadero can't wrap their heads around large open-source being coded just for fun without making any sort of money.
Important
Map Editor uses DirectX libraries, which are only available in C:\Program Files (x86)\Embarcadero\Studio\22.0\lib\win32\release\psdk. If your C++ Builder install path is different, please re-add ddraw.lib, dsound.lib and dinput.lib
The original game used 16 bit graphic modes for performance reasons, so DirectX rendering system was optimized for this.
This means that Map Editor needs to be run on a desktop with bit depth set to 16 bit to work correctly. As this is no longer possible in Windows 10/11, some shims are required:
- get DDrawCompat from https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat/releases
- extract ddraw.dll into the path contains the Map Editor executable, either tmp/MapEditor/Win32/Debug if you're running from inside C++ Builder or in bin if you are running stand-alone.
- copy [etc/DDrawCompat/DDrawCompat.ini] into the same path(s) as above.
The tools (map editor and the like) are hardcoded to treat all images as PNGs, so PNG is the official format for graphics that are shared between engine and editors. This might be changed in the future by using a generic API to load graphic files in the tools (e.g. GDI+).
None of the tools are integrated with VFS (PPT_USE_VFS is NOT defined for these projects). This means some assets are required to be in a certain relative paths, e.g. CIGUnit effect sprite should be in PATH_EXPLODES_GFX (Data/Gfx/Explode)
The license block at the beginning of some source files is still mentioning GPL. Please treat the license as LGPL.
PNGDib library used by GPngLoad class is a custom version that uses PP::Stream interface. This is only for the DirectX system.
Documentation covering many aspects of the engine is available in doc folder.
Docs also contain an article written in 2006 for a magazine in Poland called Software Developer's Journal, a tutorial on how to implement a factory building (a building that builds units, the staple of any RTS).
Pure Power Tactical Engine was originally developed at Piron Games as part of the Pure Power project by Doru "grab" Girba and Stefan "Karg" Dicu.
Big thanks to Mike "tamlin" Nordell for massive contributions to the code base.
Additional coding: Adrian "Kafka" Pop, Florin (sorry, forgot your full name).
Graphic assets come from the original Pure Power project and were created by Bogdan "Dahn" Hodorog, Stefan "Karg" Dicu, Stelian Serban and Stefan "Max" Giurgiu.
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Code is licensed under LGPL license.
Please note that CSL license is GPL.
Assets are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.