Sista is a lightweight, fast, easy-to-use, memory-safe and OS-agnostic object-oriented library for making terminal videogames and animations in C++.

Sista provides a set of classes and functions to make terminal games in C++ easier, shielding developers from having to reinvent the wheel every time they want to make a terminal videogame.

Installation

Sista as a source library

To install Sista, simply download the latest release from GitHub, and extract the contents of the archive to your project's source directory.

Sista as a compiled library

If you want to use Sista as a compiled library, use the provided Makefile. Build the libraries first, then install them with administrative privileges.

make

sudo make install

make (equivalently, make all or make build) builds the core and C API libraries in both shared and static forms, using the platform's shared-library format. Shared libraries dynamically link system dependencies. Static archives contain only Sista objects.

make install installs the libraries in the system library path and the headers in the system include path. This is the preferred inclusion method for versions v3.0.0 and later. More on this in the documentation.

sudo make uninstall

This will remove the installed files from the system library and include paths. The same disclaimer applies as above, you will need administrative privileges to run this command.

More GNU Make targets

The terminal demo is optional and can be built with make sista. It embeds Sista while dynamically linking system dependencies. make sista_against_static_lib_local explicitly links the local Sista archive with the same dependency policy.

The Makefile follows the conventional cleanup target hierarchy:

make mostlyclean removes intermediate object files while preserving built libraries and the optional sista executable.
make clean removes every normal build output, including libraries and sista.
make distclean additionally removes generated documentation.
make maintainer-clean additionally removes TAGS and distribution archives.

Other standard GNU Make targets are available:

make check (or make test) builds and runs the self-test without installing Sista.
make installcheck tests the installed shared library.
make installdirs, make install-strip, and make uninstall manage installation directories and installed files. install preserves debugging information; install-strip strips the installed shared libraries without modifying the build tree. Static archives retain their debugging information.
The section-3 and section-7 man pages in docs/man are hand-written roff files, ready to install. make man checks that they exist; editing one requires no generation step. Use make check-man to render and validate them and compile their examples (requires Python 3, Groff, and C/C++ compilers). Preview a page with man -l docs/man/sista.7.
make install and make install-man install the man pages and aliases for common class and C function names. make html generates the exhaustive Doxygen reference, and make install-html installs it. The info, dvi, pdf, and ps targets and their installation counterparts are successful no-ops because Sista has no manuals in those formats.
make TAGS creates an Emacs tags table
make dist creates sista-VERSION.tar.gz from the current Git revision.

Sista as a shared library - <tt>.deb</tt> package

We release a .deb package for Debian and derivatives with each release. The upload is manual for the moment.

go to the latest release
download the sista_<VERSION>_<ARCHITECTURE>.deb release asset
use sudo apt install path/to/sista_<VERSION>_amd64.deb, like sudo apt install ~/Downloads/sista_3.0.0-1_amd64.deb

For the moment only amd64 (for x86_64 architectures essentially) packages are published. With the right tools you can package your own.

git clone https://github.com/FLAK-ZOSO/Sista
cd packageroot
debuild -us -uc -a arm64 -b # Specify your architecture, such as "i386", "arm64", "amd64"

Sista as a shared library - <tt>.rpm</tt> package

We also publish an RPM package for Fedora, RHEL-derived distributions, and other RPM-based systems. Download the sista-<VERSION>-<RELEASE>.<ARCH>.rpm asset from the latest release, then install it with your package manager, for example:

sudo dnf install ~/Downloads/sista-3.1.0-1.el9.x86_64.rpm

To build an RPM locally, install rpm-build and run:

packageroot/rpm/build-rpm.sh

The resulting package is placed under rpmbuild/RPMS/.

Usage

Using Sista as a source library

To use Sista, simply include the "sista.hpp" header in your project's source files.

#include "include/sista/sista.hpp"

sista.hpp

Main include file for the Sista library.

The "sista.hpp" header includes all of the other headers in the "include/sista/" directory, so you don't have to include them individually.

Using Sista as a shared library

You also need to include the "sista/sista.hpp" header in your source files, as shown above.

#include <sista/sista.hpp>

This approach will require you to link against libSista when compiling your project. You can do this by adding the -lSista flag to your g++ command.

g++ -std=c++17 -o my_project my_project.cpp -lSista

See the documentation for more details on how to use Sista as a shared library and how to link against it. A comprehensive example is provided in the [Makefile](Makefile) in the repository, together with the installation targets.

Documentation

The English tutorials and basic documentation for Sista can be found at Sista - ReadTheDocs.

The actual, detailed documentation of both library and C API can be found at flak-zoso.github.io and is automatically generated from the source code using Doxygen.

Under the demo/ directory, you can find many minimal demos that showcase the features of Sista. These demos are minimal examples and do not aim to provide a complete walkthrough of the library, unlike the sista.cpp example. Their description is provided in the `demo/README.md` file.

Additional information about versions can be found in the `Release Notes`.

The documentation for the Python module can be found at flak-zoso.github.io/Sista/sista-python/.

Sista-based works

Here are some of the most relevant works based on Sista.

Inomhus - Bättre att stanna inomhus (better be in the house) - a survival videogame
Starklag - den starkastes lag (the law of the strongest) - a partial evolution simulator
Dödas - de dödas angrepp (attack of the dead) - a survival speedrun videogame
Dune - a survival videogame inspired by Dune
Inävjaga - Inälvor jagade (intestin hunt) - a survival videogame with hordes of enemies

Licensing

The library, bindings, demos, scripts, and build configuration are licensed under GPL-3.0-only.

Documentation prose and images are licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. Code examples and command snippets are licensed under GPL-3.0-only. These licenses apply to their respective portions; code examples do not require the prose license.

See GPL-3.0-only, CC-BY-SA-4.0, and REUSE.toml for license texts and per-file metadata.