This is intended to be some kind of SDL project playing with n-body systems, but right now is an almost empty project (using cmake, C++11, and SDL2) that can be used as a template for others.

This is my first time playing with cmake. The information that is used to compile the project is specified in CMakeLists.txt, the source is in src/, and the executable will be placed in bin/---this directory will be created in the process.

Steps:

1. mkdir build to create a build directory for out-of-source building (i.e. prevent cluttering the rest of the project with cmake spam and object files); this directory can be removed at any time, along with the bin/ directory, to clean the project. This directory can be called something else, but build/ is standard.

2. cd build/ to move to the build directory.

3. cmake .. to run cmake on the directory above but in this directory. This will create a number of files including a Makefile in this directory, and create the bin/ directory.

   • At this point running cmake .. again will additionally create a symlink from the compile_commands.json database to the src/ directory. This is useful for tools such as YouCompleteMe which can use it to calculate the flags needed to test compile files. Unfortunately this process does not work on the first invocation of cmake .., as it requires the file to already be present at a stage before it is originally generated, but as it uses a symlink it will remain updated. Note that this second invocation will in fact be faster than the first, and that the compile_commands.json file contains absolute paths meaning that it can be copied but cannot be used on different computers.

4. make in the build/ directory will now compile the project and output the binary executable into the bin/ directory. make clean will remove this executable, but will not delete the directory or any of the cmake files in the build/ directory.