Developer Setup and Installation Guide

It is highly recommended you already have had aurora installed before. If not familiarize yourself with this process first.

Eclipse IDE

Aurora is primarily developed in Eclipse. Download and install eclipse for your platform.

Clone the repo

Head over to Aurora github repo and clone the repo. There are no submodules included in aurora. All libraries Aurora requires are shipped in the repo.

Create Project

Launch eclipse and select the Java 25 installation on your system. Once eclipse boots. Import the existing aurora project files. Select the java folder in the repo.

Double check the window. If an option is given to create module-info.java UNCHECK THIS. Aurora DOES NOT support modules at this time.

Launch Arguments

When you launch Aurora in eclipse F11 you may see some warnings in your console. Edit your runtime configuration and add the following VM arguments.

--enable-native-access=ALL-UNNAMED
--sun-misc-unsafe-memory-access=allow

Testing in Integrated Mode

To test in integrated mode. You must put the generated class files into the Thumper directory. However this is a very annoying an manual process.

A much better solution is to create symlinks. These are special folders that you can create that point to existing folders. So we will create 3 symlinks in the Thumper directory.

  • aurora_bin
  • aurora_res
  • aurora_lib

If you launch Thumper and a .jar file cannot be found. It'll attempt to use these folders to load Aurora if they are present.

Note that this means the Aurora.jar file must either be removed or renamed by changing the .jar extension. If this isn't done then the .jar file is used and not the IDE generated code.

This demonstrates how to do this on Windows and with a shell extension. The same can be done on linux. List lookup how to create symlinks for your platform.

I use this shell extension. This adds a new option to your context menu. Pick Link Source and Drop Link As. This allows you to simply right click the source folder in aurora and select them as source. Then in the thumper directory, you simply drop them as a symbolic link.

Repeat this process for the 3 folders listed above. After this is done, remove or rename the .jar and thumper will run aurora in dev mode. In this situtation. A debug socket is opened to allow you to attach eclipse to the runtime.

Attaching to the Socket

In eclipse you can add a debug configuration pretty simply. Create the configuration. Specify localhost for the host and 5005 for the port.

When aurora is running in integrated mode, you can attach this debugger and debug.

Ignoring Build Targets

When testing code in standalone mode you may want to actually launch thumper after debugging in standalone. Typically you dont want aurora to regenerate or overwrite existing work that was done. To simply tell aurora to ignore targets. Use the Advanced->Ignore Targets option in the Mod Loader. Aurora will simply not build the levels and launch thumper as is.