Hydrolox

This is a game engine that I've been working on in my spare time over the past year or so. Writing a game engine can be uniquely challenging, as it requires running computationally intensive code in real time and combines many different domains of programming, so I thought it would be a fun thing to dive into. Long-term I'd like to create a game with it, (probably space themed, hence the name: a popular fuel/oxidizer combination for rockets), but the engine itself needs more work before then.

Hydrolox is written in Rust with shaders written in GLSL, and uses the Vulkano library in its renderer, which is a Rust wrapper around the Vulkan API. It also uses the winit library for cross-platform window creation and receiving user input. Each core system (i.e. Input, Game, Physics, Render) runs in its own thread, and use message queues to communicate with each other. This helps to better utilize the cpu's resources as well as reduce spaghettification between the systems.

In place of a linear algebra library, I'm trying to code an implementation of 3D Projective Geometric Algebra, which ideally does fewer multiplications than using a 4x4 matrix. It's in a seperate repository: https://github.com/aedank0/hydrolox-pga3d.

Hydrolox has switched over to using its own logger, hydrolox_log, which can write to a logfile in addition to writing to stdout. The Hydrolox executable uses command line arguments (via clap) to control the level of logging and whether it also writes the log to disk.

Some priorities for what I want to do next:

• Complete and debug rendering system
  • The initial version of the rendering system is now implemented, though it still needs to be tested
  • Getting an initial working version of the Game system is required before testing can begin
  • Vulkano just updated with breaking changes, so the rendering system needs to be updated to use the latest version
  • The rendering system has been updated for the latest Vulkano version, but still needs to be tested
  • Testing and fixing complete! The program now renders a spinning monkey with a directional light
  • Next steps are to implement more advanced light sources and shadows
• Refactor the CompData struct to no longer use unsafe code
  • Doing some research of other type-erased vec libraries like any_vec, it seems that using unsafe code is better overall in terms of efficiency and readability
  • Instead of factoring out unsafe code, I refactored CompData to have more idiomatic use of NonNull and implemented lazy allocation
  • Implementing certain things like deserialization would be significantly more difficult while using type erasure, so I instead decided to just use typed containers, possibly with macros in the future if needed to reduce repetition
• Finish implementing Game system
  • This uses an ECS based framework for handling game object data and behaviours
  • Each of the ECS systems (which I'll call processes to differentiate from the core systems) will run in parellel using a threadpool
  • A basic version without the threadpool is implemented. Integrating rayon should be as simple as adding a dependency and swapping out the iterator used for the processes to a parallel one. I'm going to hold off on doing this until it's more needed
• Implement the Input system
  • This system will handle user input events and translate them to actions, which will then be sent to the Game system
  • The basic system is in place, more bindings will be added as needed when development on the actual game begins
• Refactor the way core systems are initialized
  • Currently core systems have duplicate code for creating themselves and spawning their threads, this code should be moved to a generic implementation on the System trait
• Add more and better logging
  • Should use log's target to show which system/process the log comes from
• Implement a basic physics process and components
• Implement player: Movement, ability to interact with objects, etc.
  • Basic player input and movement is implemented, although it's a simplified version more for testing underlying systems
• Implement advanced rendering: Skybox, spotlights, point lights, shadows, transparency, texturing
• Integrate egui for UI
• Integrate FMOD for audio