SDK Guide

The Turian SDK is a portable, self-contained bundle that lets you build games without the engine source checkout. It includes the engine/editor Zig sources, all required dependencies, the CLI tool, and (on desktop platforms) the studio and the SDL3 library.

Prerequisite

Zig 0.16.0 must be on your PATH. No other toolchain is required — the CLI shells out to zig build to compile your game.

Download Zig from https://ziglang.org/download/.

Why Zig is not bundled: Zig has no stable ABI, so the engine cannot be shipped as a precompiled library — your game is compiled together with the engine source. The SDK ships that source; you supply the compiler. (The one exception is SDL3, a C library, which is shipped precompiled in lib/.)

Install (portable — no installation step)

Extract the archive anywhere. Nothing is written to your system; the bundle is fully relocatable.

# Linux / macOS
tar xf turian-sdk-linux-x86_64-v1.0.0.tar.gz
export PATH="$PWD/turian-sdk-linux-x86_64-v1.0.0:$PATH"

# Windows (PowerShell)
Expand-Archive turian-sdk-windows-x86_64-v1.0.0.zip
$env:Path += ";$PWD\turian-sdk-windows-x86_64-v1.0.0"

The executables sit at the root of the bundle, so they are immediately visible.

Create and build a game

turian-cli new-project mygame      # scaffold a project
turian-cli build mygame            # compile it into a standalone game
mygame/.cache/zig-out/bin/game     # run it

turian-cli build:

1. Scans mygame/assets/ for user scripts (@component files).
2. Cooks all assets into mygame/.cache/game.oap.
3. Generates build.zig + main.zig in mygame/.cache/ and compiles them with Zig.
4. Produces mygame/.cache/zig-out/bin/game[.exe] alongside game.oap.

The resulting game executable is self-contained: it reads every asset from game.oap in its own directory and needs no engine source tree.

Multiple SDK versions

Yes — each release extracts to its own turian-sdk-<platform>-v<version>/ folder, and they can coexist freely. The CLI locates the engine sources via the turian-sdk.json marker next to its own binary, so each turian-cli always uses its own sibling sources. To pick a version, put its folder on PATH or invoke it by full path:

~/sdks/turian-sdk-linux-x86_64-v1.0.0/turian-cli build mygame   # build with 1.0.0
~/sdks/turian-sdk-linux-x86_64-v1.1.0/turian-cli build mygame   # build with 1.1.0

No shared/global state is involved.

SDK layout

turian-sdk-<platform>-v<version>/
  turian-cli[.exe]         headless build tool
  turian-studio[.exe]      GUI editor (desktop platforms only)
  turian-sdk.json          SDK marker (used by the CLI for path resolution)
  engine/                  engine Zig source + vendored C (cgltf, stb)
  editor/                  editor Zig source
  deps/
    math3d/src/            math library
    guid/src/              UUID library
    serde/src/             serialization library
    open_asset_package/src/  .oap reader/writer
  lib/
    libSDL3.a              SDL3 static library (desktop platforms only)

Platform notes

macOS SDKs are currently CLI-only (cross-compiled, without SDL3), so building a windowed game on macOS is not yet supported.

Environment variable overrides

For advanced use (e.g. testing a patched engine alongside a released SDK), individual paths can be overridden. Env vars take priority over SDK-relative paths, which take priority over build-time baked paths (only present in in-tree dev builds).

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