Duke's Blog

For a couple months I have been working on a game engine written entirely in C++. It uses the SDL and OpenGL APIs for graphics, input, etc. The engine is very portable due to these APIs. I will most likely have builds supporting Macs and Unix. It should easily port to many other platforms as well.

Features

Text Rendering from a sprite sheet.

Menu system.

Loads a special file format defining where each menu button is on the screen, what images it uses, and what it does when pressed.

HUD system.

Easy to use objects named "HUDElements" to display images and text.

Particle system.

Fully editable particle effects.

Texture Loading (using SDL_Image) and management.

Supports .png, .jpg, .bmp, .tga, .pcx, .tiff, .gif, and .xpm image files.
Automatic cleaning of all textures upon program exit.
Resource pooling using temporary files.

3d model loading and rendering.

As of now only supports .obj model files and .mtl material files.

Special Effects

Lens flare (2d)

Features currently on the TO-DO list:

Occlusion Culling with Occlusion Queries

Increases performance.

Lens flare (3d)

Render a lens flare based on a 3d point.

Sprite bill-boarding

Aligns particles to always face the camera (user).

Normal mapping

Greatly increases detail on models.

Advanced Camera Functions

Many more features are planned.

Here is a video and some pictures:

1/31/2012
Video showing the 3d models, 3d text rendering, and particles.

1/6/2012
Early implementation of the menu system. This also shows a tileable hud element (shell casing), a particle system in the background, and 2d text rendering.