Command line interface

A Command Line Interface (CLI) is a way to communicate with/use a program exclusively through a command line, or terminal. This is especially useful in a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headless_system Headless system] or for scripts, such as performing operations in bulk, or for users who prefer the command line or don't have a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface Graphical User Interface (GUI)]. Because of this, most compilers and linux software provide a CLI in addition to, or in place of, a GUI.

== Brief [[ENIGMA]] history ==
Enigma started out as a CLI exe only. [[LateralGM]] was forced to communicate to it through this limited fashion, writing the game to a file, passing the filename to the exe, and pipe-reading ENIGMA's output from the exe and files that it produced, which was much slower than it had to be.

One day, [[User:IsmAvatar|IsmAvatar]] figured out how to get Java and C++ to communicate via [[DLL]] with the use of JNA, which allows LGM and ENIGMA to share memory structures and make interactive calls to each others functions, which is much faster and much more dynamic. Since then, ENIGMA has redirected itself towards being a DLL, and the build process has been streamlined for that purpose. As a result, ENIGMA became almost exclusively a GUI program.

Due to the thee-tier architecture of LateralGM (front-end back-end separation), it isn't hard to use a headless LateralGM - that is, just the data and logic tiers, without the front-end presentation tier. As such, it wasn't long before this fact was exploited, and combined with the [[Plugin]] to communicate with the dll, to construct a Java CLI for ENIGMA.

== emake.exe Native Command Line ==
[[ Image:emake.png | thumb | 400px | The native command line interface project on Windows 10 ]]
In order to achieve continuous integration testing for ENIGMA, a native C++ command line interface was created. At first it could only build and run empty games with various systems and extensions configured. It then added support for a Single Object Game (*.sog) format. Later, a Google Protocol Buffer format was designed to replace the C backend. It is currently being used to not only load and run projects stored in various GameMaker formats (i.e. GMK, GMX, and YYP) through libEGM, but to also test them for regressions using Google GTest suite.

== Usage ==
Currently, ENIGMA's CLI is very primitive. Its usage is as follows:

# Ensure that ENIGMA is already fully checked out and compiled
# cd to ENIGMA's directory.
# java <jvm options> -jar plugins/enigma.jar <game_file.gmx>

The only options available are optional jvm options (e.g. max heap size, so you don't run out of memory: -Xmx=500m) and the game file that you wish to compile (mandatory). Everything else is assumed as defaults, such as the compilation platform (usually the same platform that you're running from) and the outname (simply replaces game_file's extension with the target extension, like exe on windows).
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