Welcome to MyEngine, this is a completely open source (MIT License) game engine written in C++14 with Electron and Node.js attached for easy modding and UI design.
I created this engine because I found a large lackluster of existing game engines and wasn't particularly impressed by the large cost on getting a mainstream engine. This engine is designed after some of the best (also open source) tools in the industry. This engine is special because it is designed to be extremely modular and extremely cross platform. The target operating systems should include unix based systems, windows, and browser technologies like emscripten, ppapi, and eventually webassembly. Mobile support will come through web support but may eventually become native apps (currently this is limited by electron and nodejs being ported to mobile or the engine gaining more abstraction to support those platforms and simulate electron and nodejs support).
Graphics: Completely portable graphics using SDL2. Different render classes can be written for every driver if someone wants that driver. The windows will be powered by Electron (desktop) and browsers (mobile). Electron/browsers will also power the UI allowing highly customizable UIs, which will be overlayed on the game.
Physics: Bullet
Networking: Nodejs/Cap'nProto This mixture of networking allows networking to be cross platform, fast, and easy. No matter where the networking is happening.
Sound: In Planning stage (YSE is a major contender for our internal use)
Mod API/Scripting: Nodejs. All of our mods will be javascript driven through a shielded api that enforces permissions and reduces security risks. Scripts only get permissions that they are granted by the user running the mods and even then must go through the api defined in the engine to gain access to any external resources.
After quite some time away, I have returned to work on the engine. I know it has a lot of potential, but I have just been
busy making money and getting married and stuff. :p It looks like the work I had done in feb was actually pretty close to
working but I have to finish writing the DefaultRenderer class and I just never got around to it.
I cleaned out a lot of old dust from the first iteration of the engine and will continue as I get more into working on this.
Some big points:
First, I have ditched MyUPlay as an organization (website is already gone). I wasn't really ever working on it to make it a brand and no one really used my stuff anymore (Plug+ days). What this means however is that all of my mentions and namespacing for MyUPlay is going to go away. I think I will just flatten the namespace to not include it from now on.
Second, I am aware of some compiler incompatibilities that will make building the engine a little difficult, probably until I get around to hacking on nodejs itself/electron. Currently those projects use infrastructure that isn't friendly to cross compiles without building them locally, which is also painful to try to encourage them to cross compile even then. So for now I don't recommend attempting any cross compiles, and just target the platform you are on. (Also means mobile development is shelved for now)
Third, my opinion of Unreal has changed since I started this project, but unreal has also changed to overcome its shortcomings. When I first started this project Unreal was better suited to be a first person shooter engine/static map type games where everything exists at compile time that will exist at runtime. It has since massively improved its support for runtime mesh generation (to support voxel style games, etc). I will be working on my secret sauce game code named YAVE (for now) at the same time as working on this. I plan to bring over some of the smarts of unreal engine design to this. I always wanted a visual shader editor but that is miles off on this, but maybe I can just take some of their simpler patterns in the mean time.
(Ironically (maybe), the whole reason I am back to hacking on this is because Unreal engine documentation went down.)
Hi, I want to keep people posted, seeing as I have a couple stars and watchers. I haven't abandoned this project, I have just been busy with work and life. Since my last commit I have learned several useful coding techniques that I will probably integrate into the engine. Additionally, I have been experimenting with unreal engine and would like to take features I like and try to implement them here as well.
My plans for the engine will be to use a better organization strategy for code and attempt to implement/use a dependency injection library to see if c++ is friendly to it. After that I will finish polishing the new renderer and get everything compiling again, then push hard to get some of the skeleton parts for writing an actual game. Maybe a course on using the engine would be a good way to test the engine and teach people how to use it most effectively.
Anyways, I will be back to coding soon.
We have finally released version Alpha-1 which includes the first working version of the GLES2Renderer and the Shader compiler.
I am really proud of the shader compiler as it is node based, aka you can drag and drop nodes to create shaders without even having to know any glsl. This will eventually have its own GUI similar to blender.
This list comprises everything still needing to be done before this engine can be used for any sort of release of any game.
- Abstracted keybinding for game input with default values. (wasd for movement, etc)
- Sound - Was originally targetting sdl but not so much anymore.
- Physics - Need to actually hook in the physics library. (Special Object3D type class that allows you to apply physics to objects)
- Electron Overlay - Need to setup the steps to include it in the render process.
- Electron Launcher/Menu - Games will implement these on their own
The following naturally got completed by switching to bgfx.
- Electron patcher - Not required, but eventually this will be part of the engine, will patch all files over p2p and html.
- GLES3Renderer - Future work (Can optimize somethings and specialize a few others)
- VulkanRenderer - Max performance out of rendering.
All code uses a very simple coding style called Modified K&R. You can find this style referenced in eclipse or you can just follow the linux kernels coding standards.
- We use tabs, not spaces, because its what tab was made for. (If you don't like tabs, you can set your editor to display tabs as two spaces but we would really appreciate that all commits are tab indented. Git provides tools to have the code automatically converted to your preferred indentation format and back if you really want spaces.)
- Header file include guard names should be of the format MYENGINE_NAME. We don't need to know that it is a HPP or H file, we don't care where the file is located, and we don't need the trailing underscore to waste time/space. The convention follows similar to java, we list what project it is (MyEngine) and the name of the primary class in the file. If for some reason your naming is not unique, consider why you have an overlapping name and if it could be better named or combined.
Some extensions to the style that are vague but we would appreciate if you at least try to maintain these concepts throughout the code.
- Keep it simple stupid, we don't want the code to be optimized because its rare that you know better than the compiler. Usually the compiler will take the lame version of a method and spruce it up to whatever the processor can do in a manor that is likely far better than c code can express. Another reason to avoid optimization is that it can very quickly become a rats nest for bugs, I never want to have to untangle some obscure code because someone was "making it run faster". I will just rewrite the function and get mad at whoever did it.
- Passing by reference is your friend. This somewhat contradicts the earlier statement but mastery of this helps weed out
bugs because it forces the use of const or non const parameters so we know exactly what the parameter is intended for.
It also helps reduce copying but that is something the compiler
willshould optimize out anyways. - Documentation is optional unless the function is particularly complex. Leaving comments on things that you don't want removed for some reason is a good idea, leaving comments on strange math is a good idea, however, as most of the original project is undocumented but also straighforward enough not to require it, we won't require it either (yet).
- Please provide examples for any code you create. Ideally your examples are also the test cases. This will be enforced in the future and all classes must have test cases. We will have a testing suite format that works nicely with examples. (Functionality ported from Three.js should still be tested/examples should be provided)
Any questions or things outside of this document should be directed to us on the issue tracker.