nngn

2020-08-30T17:54:08

Back in 2018, I publicized a project I had been working on intently for more than a year. Because of the circumstances, it ended up never having its own entry here in this blog. That is finally being corrected, and I am going to write not just one, but a series of posts about it.

quid

It is always difficult for me to even explain exactly what it is. The shortest and least interesting version is: a game engine. However, game development does not really interest me, so for lack of a better description, I call it a "2D/3D game/graphics/physics engine".

What interests me are the components of game engines, and in reality, it is simply a place for me to explore those in a coherent manner. I implemented it from scratch based on just a few low-level libraries. From its humble beginnings in the sleepless nights of my period in college, it has developed scripting, graphics, physics, and much more — and consumed an inordinate amount of time and effort.

I do not have any commercial aspirations for the project (if it is not obvious from the art repurposed from existing games). It has been from the beginning a tool for studying and learning and contains work exclusively of my own. My goal in sharing it openly is so that those can be extended to other people.

ubi

The home page for the project has been up for two years, even though I never mentioned it here. It has a short description and links to the source code — the project was always open-source and free — as well as some screenshots and a video demonstration.

Additionally, one of the things I wanted to explore was compilation to WebAssembly instead of (or as well as) native code. The page has a link to a web version of the engine that runs exclusively in the browser, so it can be tested very easily without downloading or compiling code.

quo

This post was intentionally succinct and light on technical details because, as I mentioned, I want to delve deeper in future posts. It is long overdue, but I want to finally get to that in the following weeks.

As a start, this post describes how Lua is the core of the engine. These and all further posts can be found in the nngn tag page.