lyonb96 / noble

Work-in-progress 3D game engine

Noble

Noble is a work-in-progress game engine that I've been developing to practice and demonstrate my skills with C++. It uses custom containers and strings, custom memory management tools, and more.

Architecture

The gameplay-layer of the engine is built similar to Unreal Engine or Unity, where a Component system is used to build custom functionality. GameObjects are containers of Components, and Components provide the unique behavior for GameObjects. GameObjects can be possessed by Controllers, which provide input queues to move Objects through the world.

The lower-level architecture is fairly simple. The Engine class handles initializing subsystems like the logger, physics, renderer. Each of these subsystems are wrapped in their own class(es).

ShaderTool

ShaderTool is a small utility I put together in C# to help with some of the asset massaging for BGFX. It runs BGFX's shaderc with the correct commands and builds those shaders into my custom shader format designed for Noble. It also loads Assimp-compatible 3D models and converts them into Noble-friendly static mesh files. I chose to implement mesh conversion in a separate tool because I didn't want to introduce another dependency (that being Assimp) to the engine itself. Additionally, this will eventually be built into the engine editor itself, so I didn't want to spend a ton of time implementing complex mesh conversion in C++ if it was going to be dumped at a later date.

To-do

Currently, I'm working on implementing Bullet physics into the engine. Once I feel comfortable with this, I want to move on to fleshing out rendering and implementing more than simple static meshes. At this point, I'd also like to build up ShaderTool to be easier to use. Additionally, I want to expand on the AssetManager to support packed assets, ie loading multiple assets from a single file.

Third-party

The engine uses BGFX for rendering, Bullet for physics, GLM for mathematics, and nlohmann's JSON parser for reading config files (though this may change to INI files at some point, I haven't decided).

noble's Issues

Inverted input for some users

I've been informed that in testing, some are experiencing "inverted movement" ie WASD keys correspond to the opposite of the expected move direction. Need to investigate if this is caused by actual inversion in the input code, or if the camera is upside down, which would visually give the same effect.