Falling Engine

fallingEngineDemo.mp4

A small and performant data-oriented C++ game engine with:

1. Centralized Asset Database
2. Sparse-Set Entity Component System
3. A (mostly) Stateless OpenGL Rendering Backend

I've been working on Falling Engine for many weeks now, really trying to understand the design principles behind game engines and high-performance realtime software overall instead of just one-shotting this with an LLM.

And also it's just really cool to be able to say that I'm making a game engine!

Now that I've finished the renderer, completing the big 3 systems required to put a mesh on the screen, I'm probably gonna split my attention across a couple other projects I've been wanting to make.

For now, you can inspect the code (main execution is in game/main.cpp) and/or run the demo shown in the clip above.

How to Run the Demo

These instructions target Debian/Ubuntu Linux. I haven't tried it on a Windows machine yet (sorry!).

You will need:

• Git, CMake 3.16 or newer, Ninja, and a C++20-compatible compiler
• vcpkg (for library dependencies)
• A machine with OpenGL 3.3 support
• Linux dev. packages used by GLFW and OpenGL

Install the system dependencies:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential cmake ninja-build git curl zip unzip tar \
  pkg-config libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libxinerama-dev \
  libxcursor-dev xorg-dev

Install vcpkg if you do not already have it, then set VCPKG_ROOT to its absolute path:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
./vcpkg/bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
export VCPKG_ROOT=/absolute/path/to/vcpkg

Clone, configure, and build the game target:

git clone https://github.com/ng-daniel/falling-dngine.git falling-engine
cd falling-engine
cmake --preset vcpkg
cmake --build build --target game --parallel

To build all executables (such as the asset browser/inspector and some engine tests), just run this instead of targetting game specifically:

cmake --build build

The configure step reads vcpkg.json and installs the C++ dependencies (OpenGL, GLFW, GLAD, GLM, and Dear ImGui) automatically. Then, from the repository root, run:

./build/game/game

Run the executable from the repository root because the demo loads assets from ./game/assets. Use WASD to move, Q/E to move vertically, and the arrow keys to look around. Close the window to exit.

Roadmap

Goal

• make a minimum viable engine with solid fundamentals and expandability
• make some example projects
• develop a small singleplayer FPS game with this engine

Completed

• asset manager + serialization (BASICALLY DONE!!!)
• scenes, ECS, components (ALSO DONE!!!)
• renderer, (debug) camera (DONE!!!)

MVP Remaining Items

• profiler (to identify bottlenecks)
• input system
• scripting and custom game logic
• physics

QOL Features (in the order of how much I want to do them...)

• visual post-processing
• particle system
• audio system
• UI system

Really Cool Stuff (probably not anytime soon)

• vulkan graphics backend
• scriptable runtime
• networking/multiplayer