orb1t-ua / dingus

engine used in some nesnausk! demos

Dingus is a bunch of code and tools for realtime 3D graphics or games applications. It has been used in my own projects, and basically that's it. If you'd find Dingus useful for you - great! I'm releasing everything under MIT license. Design philosophy was something like "don't hardcode". Dingus won't give you bumpmapping or shadows or fancy water surfaces per se, it expects you to implement whatever you like. What's the point in "the engine" then? Perhaps to supply the very low-level functionality, like resource management (very basic), rendering parameters (very basic), etc. Yes, that's not much. Oh, and to give some tools.

Evolution

Back in 2001, some guys gathered together for a bold attempt to conquer the world with a space shooter game. Predictably enough, the world was not conquered; but all of them went to real jobs in the game industry.

In beginning of 2003, I've written an "engine" for LTGameJam2003, reusing lots of code and ideas previously made by the same people. This "engine" was called "dingus" (don't ask me why) and then it all went wild. Basically, I've got into demoscene more or less seriously, and the engine was used in most nesnausk! demos so far. With each demo the engine was somewhat evolving: abstraction layers thrown out, code becomming smaller, tools more tested etc.

An engine with similar ideas/philosophy (hey, the same people!) was also used for some small games and other interactive entertainment projects while I was working at my previous job. That's it; right now I am working at Unity Technologies on Unity game development tool, and have not so much time left to be working on dingus. Oh well!

What now?

Clone the source code. Some documentation in dingus/doc folder.

What's the point?

I know that the engine itself provides nearly zero value. However, I'll try to write some small articles on how the engine is made and hopefully provide some standalone tools. If that would benefit anyone in any way - that's great. Oh, and having the sourcecode repository somewhere online is more convenient for myself.