Nwge
nwge (for new game engine, pronounced nooj) is small game-oriented graphics-and-other-stuff engine.
Note that the Introduction page of the nwge docs contains more up-to-date information as well as plenty of other pages describing the engine's ins-and-outs. This page is not always kept up-to-date.
Fun fact: Nwge's birthday is April 18th, 2023. That means nwge is 1 year old!
What does it do?
The nwge engine has 3 main purposes:
- State management,
- data loading,
- rendering.
State management
Nwge utilizes a class-based approach to state management. Each major state your
game can be in is a separate class derived from one common, abstract State
class. As you switch between states the engine will automatically unload all the
data previously used by the state. The state then has various methods to
communicate to the engine what needs to be loaded. Additionally, the engine
provides a sub-state system. Sub-states are essentially smaller states that run
on top of one big main state. Sub-states are not allowed to load data, and as
such all necessary data must be passed from the main state to its sub-states.
Since the sub-states are internally stored on a stack, a sub-state can choose
whether sub-states below it in the stack are updated or rendered. This is useful
for a pause menu, for example: a pause menu sub-state would prevent the main
state from being updated while the user interacts with the menu.
Data loading
You can view an exhaustive description of nwge's data system at the nwge data system documentation.
In short: the data system is based around queues, which allow the engine to only load data while not in the middle of game play -- most often during state changes. The data system also provides access to bundle files for storing game data and stores for persistent game data storage (game files, settings etc.).
Rendering
Nwge has a simplistic renderer. It is effectively a kind-of-sort-of-lightweight wrapper over plain OpenGL. It's mostly useful due to its built-in shaders and textures making it easy to get a couple textured rectangles on screen alongside some ASCII text.
Other
Keep in mind that nwge is just a shared library. You can use just about any system or 3rd-party libraries your heart desires. Nwge tries to be as flexible to your needs as possible.
Why does it exist?
Engineless gamedev is fun apparently... I decided to give it a shot, developing a small game using SDL2. I realized pretty quickly that making the engine at the same time as making the game caused a lot of non-reusable code in the engine's part of the code. Eventually, I gave up on continuing development of the game and utilized what little code I could to start a new game engine. By focusing on code reusability, I have a pretty powerful solution I can freely reuse between as many game projects as I wish! (kind of the whole point of a game engine, no?). Due to it's bare-bones nature, it supports any kind of game you could imagine. As of right now, the best you'll be getting is basic 2D graphics, but if you're insane enough to write your own shaders and everything in between -- anything is possible.