Planetar is a game that was written as part of the Ubisoft Toronto 2022 NEXT programming challenge. The prompt was to take inspiration from the classic arcade game Atari Gravitar and add your own spin on it. In my case, the spin was that the game was moved into 3D!
- Software 3D Renderer
- Entity Component-esque System
- Reflection (What is Reflection?)
The engine used to make the game, dubbed "NextCore" has a number of interesting features under the hood. NextAPI2022 only has support for simple sprites, and so NextCore built a software 3D renderer on top of the simple sprite system.
One of the major pillars of NextCore is its reflection system, where types that are registered with the reflection system can be introspected. That is, information on their data members can be queried at runtime, and objects can also be constructed in a type agnostic-way using strings and type references.
NextCore also has an entity component system that uses pool allocators to store components. The entity component system is tightly integrated with the reflection system, and so you can store types at runtime and add, get, remove, or otherwise modify components without knowing their type at compile time.
NextCore doesn't have smart pointers or reference counting, as users can store raw pointers to components. Reflection allows NextCore view member types at runtime, and automatically update pointers when components' are moved around in memory, making working with pointers and references super easy for users.
Ensure that you have Premake5 installed.
Currently only tested and designed for Windows and Visual Studio 2017 / 2019. Your mileage may vary with other build tools and operating systems.
Navigate to the root directory of the project, and run the command
# Visual Studio 2017
premake5 vs2017
# Visual Studio 2019
premake5 vs2019
# Clean project files
# Note, on Windows, this command will tell you that clean is not
# ported. This is a bug with premake, and can be safely ignored.
premake5 cleanFrom there, open the visual studio solution and build the solution, and run the project.