Nova Game Engine

Nova is a community-focused, open-source game engine built in C++20. It is designed to capture the soul and aesthetic of the "classic" era of online building games (2007), while utilizing modern reflection and rendering techniques.

🌟 The Vision

Nova is born out of a desire to return to a simpler, community-driven platform, that ROBLOX used to be back in the day. We are here to preserve the aesthetics, but provide modern security, and modern tooling to support modern development.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Language: C++20
• Reflection: reflect-cpp
• Rendering, input and window management: SDL3
• Scripting Luau and LuaBridge3
• License: GPL v3

⚖️ Legal & Asset Disclosures

Nova is an independent project and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Roblox Corporation.

Legacy Assets: This project utilizes certain legacy textures, meshes, and sounds originally created by Roblox Corporation (c. 2007-2009). These assets are used under the principles of preservation and are the intellectual property of Roblox Corp. Nova is intended as a "clean-room" engine implementation; the source code is entirely original and licensed under the GPL v3.

🚀 Getting Started

Configuring CMake

vcpkg: to configure and build, you must install vcpkg:

git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git

cd vcpkg

.\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat  # On Windows
# or
./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh   # On Linux/macOS   

Configure with the standard cmake command:

cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/path/to/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/path/to/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake please point this to the vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON is optional, unless you want full IDE support. -G Ninja is also optional, but highly recommended over make. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug you can change this to Release, or other CMake build types

Building with CMake

Build with the standard cmake command:

cmake --build build

You can also use ninja or make in the directory build but this is much better, and it auto-detects!

Contributing

We welcome all kinds of contributions, as long as you maintain the charm and aesthetics of 2007, and the code is safe and secure.