Installing Cocos2d-x

Getting ready

To follow this recipe, you need to download the zip file from the official site of Cocos2d-x (http://www.cocos2d-x.org/download).

At the time of writing this book, version 3.4 was the latest stable version that was available. This version will be used throughout this book.

How to do it...

1. Unzip your file to any folder. This time, we will install the user's home directory. For example, if the user name is syuhari, then the install path is /Users/syuhari/cocos2d-x-3.4. In this book, we call it COCOS_ROOT.
2. The following steps will guide you through the process of setting up Cocos2d-x:
   • Open the terminal
   • Change the directory in terminal to COCOS_ROOT, using the following command:

     $ cd ~/cocos2d-x-v3.4
     

   • Run setup.py, using the following command:

     $ ./setup.py
     

   • The terminal will ask you for NDK_ROOT. Enter into NDK_ROOT path.
   • The terminal will then ask you for ANDROID_SDK_ROOT. Enter the ANDROID_SDK_ROOT path.
   • Finally, the terminal will ask you for ANT_ROOT. Enter the ANT_ROOT path.
   • After the execution of the setup.py command, you need to execute the following command to add the system variables:

     $ source ~/.bash_profile
     

     Tip

     Open the .bash_profile file, and you will find that setup.py shows how to set each path in your system. You can view the .bash_profile file using the cat command:

     $ cat ~/.bash_profile
     

3. We now verify whether Cocos2d-x can be installed:
   • Open the terminal and run the cocos command without parameters:

     $ cocos
     

   • If you can see a window like the following screenshot, you have successfully completed the Cocos2d-x install process:
   

How it works...

Let's take a look at what we did throughout the above recipe. You can install Cocos2d-x by just unzipping it. You know setup.py is only setting up the cocos command and the path for Android build in the environment. Installing Cocos2d-x is very easy and simple. If you want to install a different version of Cocos2d-x, you can do that too. To do so, you need to follow the same steps that are given in this recipe, but they will be for a different version.

There's more...

Setting up the Android environment is a bit tough. If you recently started to develop Cocos2d-x, you can skip the settings part of Android. and you can do it when you run on Android. In this case, you don't have to install Android SDK, NDK, and Apache ANT. Also, when you run setup.py, you only press Enter without entering a path for each question.