Environment¶

Environment Variables¶

SCRIMMAGE relies on several environment variables to find XML files, plugins, 3D mesh files, binary data files, and configuration files. The following is a description of SCRIMMAGE’s environment variables.

SCRIMMAGE_PLUGIN_PATH : SCRIMMAGE searches directories on the SCRIMMAGE_PLUGIN_PATH for a plugin’s XML file and its shared library binary file. For example, when a user specifies the name “Straight” for an entity’s autonomy tag in a SCRIMMAGE XML mission file:
```
<autonomy>Straight</autonomy>
```
SCRIMMAGE searches for the file Straight.xml by recursively iterating over the directories specified in SCRIMMAGE_PLUGIN_PATH. In a standard SCRIMMAGE project, the following directories are appended to the SCRIMMAGE_PLUGIN_PATH: /path/to/scrimmage-project/plugin_libs and /path/to/scrimmage-project/include/scrimmage/plugins. The plugin_libs directory contains the shared library files and the include directory contains the plugin XML files.
SCRIMMAGE_DATA_PATH : SCRIMMAGE searches the data path for XML files that load terrain data, 3D meshes, and images. In a standard SCRIMMAGE project, the following directory is appended to the SCRIMMAGE_DATA_PATH: /path/to/scrimmage-project/scrimmage/data.

Environment Management¶

The SCRIMMAGE environment is managed in the user’s ~/.scrimmage directory. When a user runs the cmake command in a SCRIMMAGE project, an environment variable file for the project is written to ~/.scrimmage/env/<PROJECT_NAME>-setenv, where <PROJECT_NAME> is the name of the SCRIMMAGE project. Also, when cmake is run, the file ~/.scrimmage/setup.bash is modified to load the environment variables in the <PROJECT_NAME>-setenv file. The user is discouraged from directly editing files of the form <PROJECT_NAME>-setenv, but the user can edit the ~/.scrimmage/setup.bash by commenting out (using a #) or changing the order in which setenv files are loaded. SCRIMMAGE will not uncomment a setenv file that has been commented out, but it will append to the setup.bash file if the project changes directories and the user runs cmake again.

SCRIMMAGE will never directly edit a user’s ~/.bashrc file. Instead, the installation instructions suggest that the user manually sources ~/.scrimmage/setup.bash in their ~/.bashrc file. As per the README instructions, the user can add the sourcing of the SCRIMMAGE environment to the ~/.bashrc by running the following command:

$ echo "source ~/.scrimmage/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Thus, SCRIMMAGE environment variable files are typically sourced in the following order:

~/.bashrc points to ~/.scrimmage/setup.bash.
~/.scrimmage/setup.bash points to ~/.scrimmage/env/scrimmage-deps-setenv
~/.scrimmage/setup.bash points to ~/.scrimmage/env/scrimmage-setenv
~/.scrimmage/setup.bash points to ~/.scrimmage/env/<PROJECT_NAME>-setenv

SCRIMMAGE Log Files¶

SCRIMMAGE log files are located under ~/.scrimmage/logs by default. However, the user can change the log directory by modifying the log_dir XML tag in a SCRIMMAGE mission XML file.