hankotanks / engine_demo

Primitive engine to render basic 3D geometry with blinn-phong lighting

engine_demo

A basic rendering engine with an adjustable 3D camera, a grid-based environment system, and sliding entities with (janky) collision physics.

Features

• World tiles that inherit from a single trait
  • Responsible for their own geometry
  • Extensible (although only cubes are implemented at this time)
  • Emissive lighting, projects from the surfaces of the tile
• Entities
  • Built on the same Drawable trait used for tile geometry
    • Can emit light as a result
  • Position is FP, unlike tiles
  • Position can be set frame-by-frame, unlike tiles
  • Subject to engine physics
• Physics
  • Adjustable gravity
  • 3D collision detection/resolution (along Tile edges)
  • Entities move through the application of force vectors
• Controller
  • Lateral movement via arrow keys
  • Emissive entities can be thrown by dragging and releasing the left mouse button
• Camera
  • Orbits around a central point
  • Can be assigned to an entity
  • Individual axis can be locked or restricted
• Lighting
  • Uses the Blinn-Phong model for simplicity
  • Color of emission and its intensity can be adjusted

Limitations

• Primitive physics
• Geometry cannot be loaded from files
• Light data is passed to the GPU as a fixed-size array, which caps the number of lights in the scene
• Tile meshes are non-optimal. Adjacent tiles with continuous surfaces do not combine triangles

Although I initially had greater ambitions, this project was largely an excuse to play around with the matrix math that I was learning about in Linear Algebra at the time, and many things are (and will forever be) unfinished.

Graphics programming was brand new to me when I started this project. In hindsight, the interface between the CPU & GPU is inefficient and generally terrible, as is the rendering process itself.