aszlig / halley

A lightweight game engine written in modern C++

Halley Game Engine

A lightweight game engine written in C++14. It's considered to be highly experimental, and alpha quality at best.

The Halley Game Engine is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.

Design guidelines & objectives

• Modern graphics pipelines, with first-class shader support
• Written in modern C++
• "True" entity system based, with components that store data and systems that operate on families of components
• Tuned for high performance
• Code-first: no reliance on editor to generate anything
• Easy to use: games should be easy to implement
• Easy to maintain: games should be easy to keep working on long-term, after it has grown to a large project size
• Cross-platform: support as many platforms as possible
• No legacy: don't bother supporting legacy systems, such as Windows XP or older Android/iOS devices
• Rich tools: where possible, provide tools to assist in development and debugging
• Fast iteration time: hot-reloading wherever possible
• Support scripting in other languages, such as Lua

Modules

Halley is divided in a several sub-projects:

• engine
  • core: Core features of the engine, including looper, API management, resouces, and graphics engine
  • audio: Audio engine
  • entity: Framework for dealing with entities, components, and systems
  • utils: Utilities library
  • net: Networking library
  • ui: UI library
• plugins
  • asio: Network/Asio implementation
  • dx11: Video/DX11 implementation
  • opengl: Video/OpenGL implementation
  • sdl: System/SDL, Input/SDL and AudioOut/SDL implementations
  • winrt: System/WinRT, Input/WinRT, Platform/WinRT and AudioOut/XAudio2 implementations
• tools
  • editor: Editor UI
  • cmd: Command-line interface to tools
  • runner: Provides an entry point for execution and dynamic reloading. Highly experimental.
  • tools: Editor tools to generate files and assets
• tests
  • entity: Stress test of entity system
  • network: Stress test of network system
• samples
  • see this project

Platforms

The following platforms are supported:

• Windows: Tested on Windows 10 Professional 64-bit (Should work on as low as XP 32-bit)
• Mac OS X: Tested on Mac OS X 10.9.6
• Linux: Tested on Ubuntu 16.04

Installation

Tools required

• CMake 3.10+
• C++14 capable compiler:
  • Visual C++ 15.3 (Visual Studio 2017)
  • Clang 3.5
  • GCC 5.0

Library dependencies

• Engine:
  • Boost 1.66.0 (header only)
  • OpenGL [optional]
  • SDL 2.0.2 (2.0.7 recommended) [optional]
  • Windows 10 SDK [optional]
• Also required if building Tools:
  • Boost 1.66.0 libraries: filesystem, system
  • Freetype 2.6.3
  • yaml-cpp 0.5.3

Set up

• Ensure that all dependencies above are set up correctly
• Build with CMake
  • Typical: "cmake -DCMAKE_INCLUDE_PATH=path/to/headers -DCMAKE_LIBRARY_PATH=path/to/libs -DBOOST_ROOT=path/to/boost .."
  • Engine only: "cmake -DBUILD_HALLEY_TOOLS=0 -DBUILD_HALLEY_TESTS=0 [...]"
• Run "halley-editor tests/entity" (or whichever other project you want to test)
• Launch that project

Documentation

The full documentation is available on the Wiki.