This is my new game engine. The main reason for this is that the renderer in the last one wasn't designed well from the start, and other elements such as the build system became cumbersome. In this new engine, I'm hoping to avoid this.
I'm doing my best to document how I'm designing things in design/. The renderer is going to be
designed around a render hardware interface, with more complex render passes on top of that, instead of implementing
a fixed function pipeline in each graphics API like before. This engine also uses FASTBuild,
which is much more verbose than some build systems, but I've found it to be amazing to work with. Another notable feature
of this iteration is that it uses DLLs for each system, and the reason is so that the systems of the engine could be reused
by tools that I might make, and also because it makes it easier to separate functionality that shouldn't get tangled up.
The engine doesn't use the CRT or STL at all (where possible, meaning not at all on Windows and barely on Linux/Switch),
which does improve portability, especially between Windows versions. Some performance-critical functions are written to use
SIMD if the current CPU supports it (on x86, it's all dynamically enabled based on cpuid instead of being done at compile
time). I also wrote my own allocator that works pretty well, but I think there are still issues with its bookkeeping, and
I'm sure I'll have to optimize it eventually.
First, you should copy fastbuild/Config.Default.bff to fastbuild/Config.bff, and change any paths/version numbers. I
might automate this in the future, but it's probably not necessary. You need FASTBuild, download a binary from the website
or use the Windows binary in tools/ . After that, you can run fbuild in the root of the repo to build everything. Another
useful command is fbuild solution to generate a Visual Studio solution, and fbuild -compdb [target] to generate compile_commands.json.
| GDK AMD64 | Windows x86 | Windows ARM64 | Xbox 360 | Nintendo Switch | Linux | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clang | yes | yes | no | no | yes | kinda |
| MSVC | yes | yes | yes | no | no | no |
For Windows, you need Visual Studio or Clang. You also need the GDK to build the x64 version. For Xbox 360, you need the SDK, it's on Internet Archive. For Switch, you need version 15.3.2 of the SDK (also on Internet Archive), and the private repo. For Linux, you need Clang and glibc.