Exploratory project integrating the Lobster Language with the Wicked Engine.
I'm still getting the overall structure in place, so this is just a skeleton that is in pre-alpha state. I'm checking it in mainly to have it backed up at this point, it's not usable by others yet.
The short version - I like Lobster, but I don't have the time to write all of the support code that's really required for a 3d game.
When I looked around for a 3d engine, Wicked Engine seemed like the best match for me. Very well done, does a lot while not feeling as huge as Unreal. Has Lua integration, and I'm comfortable with C++ so I don't mind working directly with the Wicked Engine API's.
One interesting thing about Lobster is that it allows you to compile just the language, without the builtin engine. One day, one of my neurons fired and I thought about taking the Lobster language libary and putting it with the Wicked Engine library.
- Bind just enough of the Wicked Engine API so game logic and control can be done in Lobster. It's not intended to expose every feature to Lobster. Some things are better left to C++.
- I want to keep Lobster and Wicked Engine out of the tree, without having to make modifications to them. At the moment, I'm doing this with build variables that have the path to external Lobster and Wicked Engine directories.
- The directory the game will run from "gamedir" needs data directories from both Lobster and Wicked Engine. I've just copied mine manually, but it would be better to build a script to do that.
- Automation of the binding boilerplate code. tools\bindgen.lobster takes the binddefs.txt file and generates the code that gets the data out of the lobster VM, and the headers for the functions that implement the functionality.
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had to change wicked engine lib to use multithreaded runtime (not mt dll), and add a preprocessor to set ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL to the same level set in Lobster.Reverted that back, and now change lobster project to use multithreaded debug dlls, and removed the _ITERATOR_DEBUG_LEVEL setting from the language.vcxproj. Doing it the reverse way caused initialization problems when running the project from the debugger, where it would periodcially crash before main() was even called, when it was allocating TLS slots. -
Most Wicked Engine objects are long lived, and the lobster code can ignore lifetime issues. The minority does require remembering to delete temporaries, most annoyingly with matrices. Can make some of these objects lifetime managed by Lobster using the lobster::Resource subclass AlienResource, but haven't decided which of the problem objects deserves this treatment.
- WickedEngine
- Content/
- Editor/shaders/ Probably doing something wrong that prevents shader recompilation, shouldn't need to copy the ones the editor has compiled. Check editor code to see what it is doing differently. Or see if there's a command line recompile we can do instead of copying this.
- Lobster
- data/
- modules/