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David Kuhta edited this page Feb 16, 2022 · 19 revisions

Getting started with Hotham

Introduction

So you want to get started building something with Hotham? Awesome.

Here's how to do it.

Pre-requisites

Git LFS

Make sure you've got Git LFS installed and enabled for this repo. You'll have a real bad time if you don't.

Rust

If you haven't got Rust installed yet, go ahead and install it from the official website. Once you've got rustup installed, add the Android target too with

rustup target add aarch64-linux-android

Cargo APK

cargo apk is a tool that packages Rust applications into Android APKs so they can be run on mobile headsets. You can install it with: cargo install cargo-apk

Android SDK/NDK and Java JDK

With Android studio

If you're happy with Android studio, you can install them together from the official website. Note that you must use NDK r22b and Android SDK 28 as ndk-glue has some issues with newer versions.

Without Android studio

If that's not your jam, you can download the NDK directly here and either download the SDK directly, or install it with your system's package manager on Windows, macOS or Linux.

Once you have the SDK installed, make sure you use sdkmanager to install build-tools. You can read the docs if you haven't fiddled with sdkmanager before.

Important notes:

  • Make sure you're using NDK r22b
  • Make sure you're using SDK 28
  • Make sure you have build-tools installed
  • Make sure you have platforms installed

The Java JDK is required for APK signing, so you'll need to install that separately. It's recommended to use the Oracle distribution for best compatibility, but we haven't had any reports of issues using OpenJDK.

Setting up your development environment

Troubleshooting

Did it all explode in a fireball? Hopefully not. If it did, go back over the checklist above a couple times and see if you missed anything. If you're still running into issues, just jump onto the Discord and we'll be able to sort you out!

Running an example

Everything built okay? Great! Now let's up the ante. Let's run one of the examples on your headset. Arguably the most fun example is "Crab Saber", so let's run that.

Windows

We've helpfully included a couple of Powershell scripts to automate things on Windows. You'll need to follow these instructions before running them.

From the root directory, just run:

.\examples\crab-saber\scripts\run_on_device.ps1

And with any luck you should be good to go.

Linux / macOS

You know what to do. From the root directory run:

./examples/crab-saber/scripts/run_on_device.sh

Troubleshooting

There are so many things that can go wrong at this step. If you're still having trouble, jump onto the Discord and we'll help you out!

Next steps

Alright! So you've played a bad version of Beat Saber.. now what? Well, more than likely you're going to want to create your first application. We're still in the process of documenting that, but for now, try copying the simple_scene_example or beat_saber_example directories into a new repository, getting them built and see what you can do with them!

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