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DESIGN-MANIFESTO.md

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DESIGN MANIFESTO

this is work in progress

Oryol aims to be a lean, experimental, multi-platform, C++11, 3D engine with focus on mobile- and web-platforms.

There is no roadmap, no timeline and no feature set.

SCOPE

Oryol will at least provide the basic platform-wrapper services expected of a game engine:

  • application model (entry point, game loop, lifetime events...)
  • asset loading
  • 3D rendering
  • input
  • audio

Oryol is extensible through statically linked code modules.

Oryol is a programmer's engine, not an artist's engine. But it can be the foundation of an artist's engine.

LEAN

Oryol Apps:

  • should be small and start fast
  • should never require a big upfront download.
  • should be self-contained executables with no external dependencies
  • should not require installation (unless enforced by the host system)
  • should not require administration rights (unless enforced by the host system)
  • should be able to load required data from web servers (unless forbidden by the host system)

EXPERIMENTAL

There will be a lot of change in Oryol, subsystems will be discarded and rewritten without warning, coding style will change, design guide lines will change. The use of C++ language features will change. Hopefully this will settle over time.

One important reason why Oryol exists is that I can try out radical ideas not possible in a production engine like Nebula.

MULTI-PLATFORM

Oryol should be able to run on anything with a CPU and GPU, but especially well on web- and mobile-platforms.

Running well on a huge number of feature- and performance-limited devices is better then looking superb on a very small number of high-end devices.

As such Oryol will always be limited by lower-end 3D APIs like OpenGL ES2. If a rendering technique is only possible with the latest desktop OpenGL or Direct3D version, it will very likely not be supported by Oryol.

C++11

Why C++:

  • because Rust is not yet ready to replace C++
  • because C/C++ is the only true multi-platform language
  • because 'you don't pay for what you don't use'
  • NOT because of its 'elegance' or the standard library

Oryol carefully chooses the C++ features it uses:

  • if it requires exceptions enabled, it's out
  • if it causes code bloat, it's out
  • if it requires excessive dynamic memory allocation, it's out