This repository currently includes a single concept for a simple 'game engine plugin'. The basic premise is to allow a developer to compartmentalize logic dealing with 'game objects' so that it may be easily ingested by a wide variety of game engines, image generators (IG), or simulation hosts that provide 3D visuals. The need to support multiple 3D visualization applications over the lifetime of a product is fairly common occurance, particular in the military space.
Given that commercial simulation and image generator applications can have a wide variety of capabilities through their SDKs, the intent of this framework to allow simple things to be ported between different hosts and leave the specifics to interoperation layers that can be written for the host in question.
This concept explores the ideas of test-driven development, mocking via gMock, dependency injection, maximization of compatibility via choice of programming language (c-style interfaces) and open standard interfaces (SISO CIGI 4.0) as software engineering practices that can reduce the burden of integration in this context.
This project was developed on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition. Currently, X-Plane 11 trial version is used as a host application. It will need to be installed in order to run the example game engine plugin with X-Plane.
After downloading the repository as a zip file, extract the zip file, navigate to the Docs folder and view the SimpleGameEnginePlugin-Overview.md in the Markdown viewer of your choice. When the solution is built in Debug configuration, it will copy the plugin dlls to the default X-Plane 11 installation folder. From that point, when X-Plane is run it will load and execute the example game engine plugin.
The example plugin will eventually display a 'RADAR' widget in a corner of the screen that displays a blip for each other entity within a certain range of the the eyepoint. Running the plugin in XPlane will display some measure of progress towards that idea.
Current progress and future ideas are being tracked here.