Note: If you are reading this on Github, please not that this is only a mirror repository and the newest code is hosted on my mercurial repository at https://hg.basx.dev/games/semicongine/.

Semicongine

Hi there

This is a little game engine, mainly trying to wrap around vulkan and the operating system's windowing, input and audio system. I am using the last programming language you will ever need, Nim

The (incomplete, autogenerated) API documentation is hosted at https://semicongine.diademgames.com/.

Features

The engine currently features the following:

• No dependencies outside of this repo (except zip/unzip on Linux). All dependencies are included (libs for library dependencies, tools for binaries/scripts, semicongine/thirdparty for code dependencies)
• Low-level, Vulkan-base rendering system
• All vertex/uniform/descriptors/shader-formats can and must be defined "freely". The only restriction that we currently have, is that vertex data is non-interleaved.
• A ton of compiletime checks to ensure the defined mesh-data and shaders are compatible for rendering
• Simple audio mixer, should suffice for most things
• Simple input-system, no controller support at this time
• Resource packaging of images, audio and 3D files as either folders, zip files or embedded in the executable
• Simple font and text rendering
• A few additional utils like a simple storage API, a few algorithms for collision detection, noise generation and texture packing, and a simple settings API with hot-reloading

Wishlist

• Macro-based internal DSL to convert Nim code into GLSL/slang at compile time
• Better memory management
  • Simple buffer resizing
  • Mechanism to mark unused buffers
  • Use mapped GPU buffers without copying (implement seq with pointers to GPU memory)
  • Do not keep copy of content for un-mapped buffers around (only pass data on creating or update)

Hello world example

Attention, this project is not optimized for "hello world"-scenarios, so you have to write quite a few lines to get something to display:

import ../semicongine
import ../semicongine/rendering
import ../semicongine/input

# required
initEngine("Hello triangle")

# set up a simple render pass to render the displayed frame
var renderpass = createDirectPresentationRenderPass(
  depthBuffer = false, samples = VK_SAMPLE_COUNT_1_BIT
)

# the swapchain, needs to be attached to the main renderpass
setupSwapchain(renderpass = renderpass)

# render data is used for memory management on the GPU
var renderdata = initRenderData()

type
  # define a push constant, to have something moving
  PushConstant = object
    scale: float32

  # This is how we define shaders: the interface needs to be "typed"
  # but the shader code itself can freely be written in glsl
  Shader = object
    position {.VertexAttribute.}: Vec3f
    color {.VertexAttribute.}: Vec3f
    pushConstant {.PushConstant.}: PushConstant
    fragmentColor {.Pass.}: Vec3f
    outColor {.ShaderOutput.}: Vec4f
    # code
    vertexCode: string =
      """void main() {
    fragmentColor = color;
    gl_Position = vec4(position * pushConstant.scale, 1);}"""
    fragmentCode: string =
      """void main() {
    outColor = vec4(fragmentColor, 1);}"""

  # And we also need to define our Mesh, which does describe the vertex layout
  TriangleMesh = object
    position: GPUArray[Vec3f, VertexBuffer]
    color: GPUArray[Vec3f, VertexBuffer]

# instantiate the mesh and fill with data
var mesh = TriangleMesh(
  position: asGPUArray([vec3(-0.5, -0.5), vec3(0, 0.5), vec3(0.5, -0.5)], VertexBuffer),
  color: asGPUArray([vec3(0, 0, 1), vec3(0, 1, 0), vec3(1, 0, 0)], VertexBuffer),
)

# this allocates GPU data, uploads the data to the GPU and flushes any thing that is host-cached
# this is a shortcut version, more fine-grained control is possible
assignBuffers(renderdata, mesh)
renderdata.flushAllMemory()

# Now we need to instantiate the shader as a pipeline object that is attached to a renderpass
var pipeline = createPipeline(Shader(), renderPass = renderPass)

# the main render-loop will exit if we get a kill-signal from the OS
while updateInputs():
  # starts the drawing for the next frame and provides us necesseary framebuffer and commandbuffer objects in this scope
  withNextFrame(framebuffer, commandbuffer):
    # start the main (and only) renderpass we have, needs to know the target framebuffer and a commandbuffer
    withRenderPass(
      renderPass,
      framebuffer,
      commandbuffer,
      frameWidth(),
      frameHeight(),
      vec4(0, 0, 0, 0),
    ):
      # now activate our shader-pipeline
      withPipeline(commandbuffer, pipeline):
        # and finally, draw the mesh and set a single parameter
        # more complicated setups with descriptors/uniforms are of course possible
        renderWithPushConstant(
          commandbuffer = commandbuffer,
          pipeline = pipeline,
          mesh = mesh,
          pushConstant = PushConstant(scale: 0.3),
        )

# cleanup
checkVkResult vkDeviceWaitIdle(engine().vulkan.device)
destroyPipeline(pipeline)
destroyRenderData(renderdata)
destroyRenderPass(renderpass)
destroyVulkan()

Future development

For now all features that I need are implemented. I will gradually add more stuff that I need, based on the games that I am developing. Here are a few things that I consider integrating at a later point, once I have gather some more experience what can/should be used across different projects:

• More support for glTF format (JPEG textures, animations, morphing)
• Some often used utils like camera-controllers, offscreen-rendering, shadow-map rendering, etc.
• Some UI-stuff
• Controller support