Aquarite3D is a 3D game framework based on Modern OpenGL that currently only runs on Windows, It uses GLEW, GLFW3 and GLM as external libraries. The framework also has its own resource management. More on this later in the readme.
1. Make sure to have Visual Studio 2015 or higher installed on your system with Visual C++
2. Make sure you have Cmake installed.
3. Clone the repository
4. Run cmake from the root directory
Meta files are used in Aquarite3D to handle resource management, This allows for efficient and structured asset creation.
In the meta files you can specify Textures, Meshes, Materials and Models.
A meta file can be loaded into the framework using the method:
ResourceManager::LoadMeta(PATH_TO_METAFILE)
To create a meta files a few things should be kept in mind, most importantly is the order of calling, Aquarite3D reads Meta files from top to bottom. Since a material might require a texture and a model might require a material it is important to specify these files in a structured order. This order should always be:
0. Meta (Information about asset)
1. Textures
2. Meshes
3. Materials
4. Models
Aquarite3D requires some information about a meta file to access its contents, these are specified as the following:
#META
resourceName=YOUR_RESOURCE_NAME
offset=OFFSET_FROM_BUILD_DIRECTORY
author=YOUR_NAME
version=VERSION_HERE
You can add comments to a meta file using two slashes at the beginning of the line i.e // I am a comment.
A example Meta file can be found in game/res/example.meta
Model files are stored as .amod files in Aquarite3D. These files can contain multiple models, but it is not necessary to store all models in 1 file.
To create model files you need to have a mesh and a material, these should be specified in the .meta file
A model can hold multiple meshes and materials, and holds 2 variables for frustum culling purposes(see below).
A model also has a drawMode property, the value can either be Default or Late, Late drawing should be mostly used for
Models with transparency. Though you should always try to render as less models as possible late, as it does affect performance slightly
a model should be defined in this order:
#MODEL
name=UNIQUE_MODEL_NAME
mesh=MESH_01
material=MATERIAL_01
mesh=MESH_02
material=MATERIAL_02
radius=20.0f
ignoreFrustum=0
drawMode=Late
As you can see you can define multiple meshes and materials, though it should be noted that the material of the mesh should be defined below the mesh itself. So if you want to use the same material on multiple meshes:
#MODEL
name=UNIQUE_MODEL_NAME
mesh=MESH_01
material=MATERIAL_01
mesh=MESH_02
material=MATERIAL_01
radius=20.0f
ignoreFrustum=0
As you can see Mesh_02 now uses Material_01 A example Model file can be found in game/res/example/models/model.amod
Material files are stored as .amat files in Aquarite3D. Thes files can contain multiple materials, but it is not necessary to store all materials in 1 file.
A material in a .amat file is defined by the #MAT keyword, a material should have a unique name. A material has multiple properties such as color, diffuseMap, diffuseColor, ambientColor, specular and more.
an material definition could look like:
#MAT
name=MATERIAL_NAME
diffuseMap=TEXTURE_NAME
shader=_aquariteDefaultShader
shininess=32.0f
color=1.0f,1.0f,1.0f
diffuseColor=1.0f,1.0f,1.0f
ambientColor=1.0f,1.0f,1.0f
specular=0.5f,0.5f,0.5f
If you dont want to use a diffuseMap or any other property you can just remove the entire property, also Texture Name should be the variable name you defined in the .meta file
Temporary Notice
Currently shaders are not supported in meta files, they will be in the near future and shaders can then be loaded by the ResourceManager, for now you can use the _aquariteDefaultShader shader that is loaded by default.
Also more properties like normal maps are to be added.
To improve the performance of Aquarite3D there are a few things you may want to know. Aqaurite3D remember's the last drawn object, so it is adviced to child all objects to a entity, because children get drawn before parents. This makes sure there are almost no draw calls to the GPU. Also you could try baking entire model textures and import the model as one single mesh and one single material, This also makes sure there are less draw calls.
Copyright (C) 2019 Jens Heukers
This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.