atsatsoulas / vu

Virtual Universe 3D Engine

vu

Vu (Virtual Universe) is a skeleton 3D engine written primarily in golang. Vu is composed of various packages which are detailed in the go docs and briefly summarized below.

Packages

• vu The 3D application facing layer wraps and extends the other packages.
• vu/audio Positions and plays sounds in a 3D environment.
• vu/audio/al OpenAL bindings. Links the audio layer and the sound hardware.
• vu/data Resource data loaders including models, textures, audio, shaders, and bitmapped fonts.
• vu/device Links the application to native OS specific window and user events.
• vu/math/lin Vector, matrix, quaternion, and transform math library.
• vu/move Repositions bodies based on simulated physics.
• vu/render 3D drawing interface.
• vu/render/gl Generated OpenGL bindings. Links the rendering system and the graphics hardware.
• vu/render/gl/gen OpenGL binding generator.

Less essential, but potentially more fun packages are:

• vu/eg Examples that are used both to demonstrate and validate vu engine functionality.
• vu/grid Grid based random level generators.

Build

• Ensure GOPATH contains the vu directory.
• Build from the vu directory using ./build src or python build src. All build output is located in the target directory.
• Build and run the examples from the vu/src/vu/eg directory using go build and ./eg.

Build Dependencies

• go and standard go libraries.
• python for the build script.
• osx: Objective C and C compilers (clang) from XCode command line tools.
• win: C compiler (gcc) from mingw64-bit
• git for product version numbering.

Runtime Dependencies

• OpenGL version 3.2 or later.
• OpenAL 64-bit version 2.1.

Limitations

The engine and its packages are bare bone by design - it's a skeleton 3D engine :). In particular:

• There is no game engine editor.
• Physics only handles boxes and sphere shapes. Only a few files of the bullet physics engine were ported or wrapped to golang. Huge thank-you to bullet physics.
• Only one format is supported for each type of 3D resource data, e.g .obj for 3D models.
• The device layer interface provides only the absolute minimum from the underlying windowing system. Only OSX and Windows 7 are currently supported.
• Rendering supports standard OpenGL 3.2 and later. OpenGL extensions are not used.
• OpenGL may not be supported on all Windows graphics drivers (eg. laptop Intel based graphics)
• 64-bit OpenAL may be difficult to locate for Windows machines. See http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/oalinst.zip if/when their website is up.
• Building on Windows used golang with gcc from mingw64-bit. Building with Cygwin may have special needs.