What is NWengine?

NWengine is a game engine made with focus on modularity and customizability. It empowers developpers to build fast 2D games and graphics simulations, with the least depedencies possible.
It is written in C++ uses OpenGL API for rendering and targets only Windows for now.

Features

• Modular: Whenever possible, separation of logic is enforced.
• User friendly: The engine is written in simple C++11 and its source code can be easily integrated in any project.
• Fast: Unacessary overhead is avoided, we trust the programmer to know what he is doing.

Architecture

The engine itself is called the Core, in contrst with the Editor which was present at early stages of development, both were not seprated. Now only the Core persists. If an editor is ever to be made, it will be a completely separate project which will use the Core to achieve its goals.

Modules

Everything in the Core is either a GameObject (only one fundamental class), a component, a system or a utility.

• A GameObject is a container of components, it is updated at each game loop iteation and has draw function method that redirect drawing to its components.
• A component is a class that inherits from Component and is attached to a GameObject.
• System is quite an ambiguous term, it should not as be confused with system in ECS, as logic related components is conceptually embeded within them. System has additional logic, it is every class that manages the engine GameObjects and Components to perform a specific task or hold a specific data. Systems in general have static methods, they can inherit from Asset class to be able to load unload and manage resources. Examples of systems are Scene, Sound,Font, Batch, etc.
• Utility is every piece of code that is a helper that does not interact internally with the Core, it can be every mathematical object and function, or a wrapper arround the Windows API, etc.

Static and private

Many systems use extensively static methods. This is a design choice that will be changed in the future as it limits the ability of the engine to be used as dynamic library. To avoid unacessary overhead, almost every member is public, setters and getters are written for high level classes to avoid unsafe access to data. Variables prefixed with underscore _ hints they are intended to be readonly or private. As this rule was added lately, nothing garuntees it is the case for every class.

Inheritance

As you may have noticed, the Core uses sometimes inheritance (for assets and components for example), however this is not a the general case. Inheritance is to be avoided as much as possible as it has unacessary overhead and makes the code less readable and harder to maintain.

Memory management

Systems manage their memory and the memory used by the components they own. Systems can make use of methods Init, Destroy and SetUp, each has a specific role that should be detailed in the technical documentation. Is is avoided to run logic in every type of constructor or destructors (it wasn't the case in earlier versions though, and residue can still be observed in the code). As a consequence, initialization of objects and their destruction is done within custom methods (like those evoked bofore), and smart pointers are not used.

Issues and Contributions

If you have any issue, bug, question, or suggestion related to NWengine, please report it in the corresponding section of the repository.
There are still many features the engine lacks, many bugs to be founded, and many improvements to be made, all contributions are welcome. A pull request should cover the following points:

• Description: A clear summary of the changes you made.
• Motivation: Why you made these changes.
• Breakdown: A list of the main changes you made.
• Results and tests: How you tested the changes you made, the results and the potential issuses that can be due to these changes. Significant changes require significant description. Unit tests and integration tests are welcome.

Getting Started

Download your assets from the release page. You should then have a template project with premake5.lua, the binary NWEngineCore64.lib/NWEngineCore32.lib and an include folder with the headers architectured in a tree structure. A single NWEngineCore.h is provided too, is is equivalent of having all the headers separetely, it is better for developpers who don't like big amounts of files and includes in their project. Once you have that, and you compile your the template compiles, you are ready to start programming yout first game powered by NWengine !

Teleport to the tutorial !