architecture.md

xe architecture

code modules and their completion status

• shader loader (✔)
  • uniform handler (✔)
• simple GUI layer (✔)
• scenegraph (wip)
  • base system (✔)
  • AOI culling (mostly in scenegraph) (✘)
• render system (✘)
  • texturing (✘)
  • mesh rendering (✘)
  • quadtree voxel rendering (✘)
  • materials (✘)
    • lighting & lightmaps (✘)
    • caustics etc (✘)
  • mipmapping (✘)
  • transparency and ordering (✘)
  • (far in the future) deferred shading (✘)
• camera (✘)
• model loading (✘)
• input layer (✘)

the main game loop

• read/trigger input events
• simulate one frame
  • update frame graph
    • compute transforms
    • get transform state of all tree end-point objects
  • update physics
  • update particle simulations
• render the game stuff
• render the GUI

GameObjects and stuff

GameObjects store stuff (basically state) for a thing. GameObjects hold a SceneNode which stores transform data for an instance. There exists one GameObject per instance of an object. Different types of objects subclass directly from GameObject and add their state parameters.

Rendering gameobjects

Renderables (yeah I know, bad name) are classes that provide batched renderers for a specific type << GameObject. A single Renderable[T] instance is used for every instance of a T << GameObject. GameObjects never, ever, ever do any rendering.

Shaders

File tree and extensions

Vertex shaders have a .vert extension and go in shaders/vertex, fragment shaders have a .frag extension and go in shaders/fragment.

In the shaders/ directory, put .yml or .yaml files describing a shader linkage and the io manifest for the linkage.

Shader structure and metadata

Each shader code file should begin with #version 330 core to direct the glsl compiler to use glsl v3.30.

Each shader manifest file should look something like this:

display_name: "Cool Shader"
shaders:
  vertex: shaders/vertex/foo.vert
  fragment: shaders/fragment/baz.frag
inputs:
  - name: position
    type: vec3
    location: 0
  - name: normal
    type: vec3
    location: 1
uniforms:
  - name: model
    type: mat4

Materials

Material structure and metadata

Each material manifest should look something like:

display_name: "Funky Material"
inputs:
  - fuzziness: {type: float, glname: mat_fuzziness}
  - texture: {type: tex2, glname: global_texture}
shaders:
  - "shaders/fuzzy-shader.yml"
    pass:
     - fuzziness: {as: uniform}
     - texture # the default is {as: uniform}