Beam

Beam is a small C++17 game engine built on top of raylib, with a Node → Scene/GameObject hierarchy, an App/Manager game loop, and optional nanobind-based Python bindings.

Features

• Node hierarchy — Node, Event, Scene, and SceneManager for composing and updating a tree of game objects.
• Game objects — Text, Button, Input, Sprite, Frame, and TileMap built on a common GameObject base.
• App loop — App/Manager wrap raylib's window, input, and asset handling.
• WebSockets — WebSocketClient (via websocketpp/ASIO) for talking to a server from the game loop. See WEBSOCKET_INTEGRATION.md.
• Python bindings — the same API exposed as the beam package, generated from python/src/bindings.cpp.

Building the C++ library and examples

Requires CMake 3.15+ and a C++17 compiler. raylib, ASIO, and websocketpp are fetched automatically via FetchContent if not already installed.

./init.sh          # configures into ./build
cmake --build build

Example binaries are written under build/examples/<name>/. Build options (set with -D<OPTION>=ON|OFF at configure time):

Option	Default	Description
BEAM_BUILD_EXAMPLES	ON	Build the executables under examples/.
BEAM_BUILD_PYTHON_BINDINGS	OFF	Build the _beam nanobind extension module (requires the nanobind Python package).

Python bindings

The Python package lives in python/beam/ and wraps the compiled _beam extension module. Build and install it with scikit-build-core:

uv sync   # or: pip install -e .

import beam

app = beam.App("my game", 640, 360, 60)
...

See examples/python_demo/main.py for a complete example.

Repository layout

include/beam/    Public C++ headers (core, objects, scene)
src/             C++ implementation
python/          nanobind bindings (python/src) and the beam package (python/beam)
examples/        basic_game, websocket_example, and python_demo
scripts/         maintenance scripts (e.g. bump_version.py)

Versioning

CMakeLists.txt's project(Beam VERSION X.Y.Z ...) is the source of truth for the project version; pyproject.toml's version is kept in sync with it. Bump both with:

scripts/bump_version.py {major,minor,patch}