Introduction

Welcome to Alacrity Book, an introductory guide to using the Alacrity library.

Alacrity is a powerful open-source engine to track and manage game entities, their attributes and the buffs that affects them. Alacrity has been designed to facilitate the development of buffs and other systems in video game servers or clients. It can be used as a standalone service that game servers or clients can query, or embedded directly into a game application as a crate. This flexibility enables Alacrity to be integrated with other languages or game engines.

It's important to note that Alacrity does not provide any service integration or ready-to-use service code. Instead, it is up to users to create their own wrappers around Alacrity types and systems to build their own services using its functionality. Alacrity provides a Propagation type that enables the propagation of buffs to entities. Users can use this type to build their systems as they see fit to meet their own specific needs.

Who Alacrity Is For

Alacrity is ideal for game (or game server) developers or game designers that want to leverage complex buffs and effects configuration and calculations in their projects using a powerful third-party library. There are a variety of reasons why Alacrity could be attractive to both video game development teams and independent video game developers.

Alacrity is Open Source

Alacrity is released under permissive dual licensing MIT or Apache 2 at your choice, making it an accessible tool for any developer who wants to use it.

Who This Book Is For

This book assumes that you have prior experience with writing Rust code and some familiarity with the Lua programming language. No prior knowledge of video game design or development is required to follow this book, although some experience in these areas would be highly beneficial.

Alacrity embeds a Luau interpreter that can be exposed and used to interact with its API, if you're not familiar with Luau, take a look at their documentation in the link above.

How to Use This Book

This book can be used both as a guide and as a reference. You can refer to any section or chapter in the book at any time, but it's generally recommended to read this book in sequence from front to back. Later chapters build upon concepts presented in earlier ones, while earlier ones may not delve deeply into the concepts they introduce, as they are revisited in later sections or chapters.

If you find yourself wondering about a specific concept or topic in a later chapter, try going back to the Alacrity Concepts chapter to refresh your memory.

Source Code

The source code used to generate this book can be found on the SourceHut Forge.