voodoo - a 3D game programming library

[zacharycarter]

Hello!

I've been itching to work on a project which serves as an excuse to try out Janet. This is what I've created in an attempt to scratch that itch: voodoo,

It's far from complete or even useful really. I was previously working on a browser game, which I intend to use as dogfood for this project.

I'll try to get a hosted version online soon.

Shout out to @ianthehenry for creating Bauble studio as it's' been an invaluable source of ideas and example code. Also for the book and blog posts he's written about Janet. Also thank you @sogaiu for answering questions for me in the Janet Zulip help channel, and everyone that has and currently contributes to Janet. I've found it to be a very enjoyable language to code in.

As I make more progress I'll post updates here.

[AlecTroemel]

this is really cool! I've had a similar idea bouncing around in my head for a while. What does your roadmap look like for Voodoo?

Any thoughts on supporting 2D?

Being able to open up multiple textareas, similar to this clojure project, would be very cool

[pepe]

OT. I wish your wife the best of luck, and please take as much care as possible so she stays in the most pleasing mood. And say hi to your older one 👋🏾.

[pepe]

PS: I have read your blog post, and oh man, I wish I could write half as well as you do. "From the bottom of my heart" :-).

[AlecTroemel]

@zacharycarter as someone with a 2 year old and another on the way, I can relate to time for projects being hard to come by 😄

I also ready through your blog, and agree with pepe that it was well written! I'm want to read more from you (does your site have an rss feed? I couldnt find one poking around)

Thank you for the roadmap in voodoo! Reading through it, there may be a couple places I can contribute. Also, If I can swing it, I may try using voodoo in a gamejam this spring. I have very little experience in 3d, so it would be a learning experience for sure.

[zacharycarter]

@pepe and @AlecTroemel please accept my sincerest apologies for not replying to your comments sooner! I've been a bit swamped with job interviews, and life in general. I'm starting to get into the technical rounds, so hopefully my job search will be wrapping up in the next couple, or few weeks.

I very much appreciate the kind words from both of you regarding my blog. I noticed a bunch of spelling and grammatical errors after reading it, and it was a bit all over the place, but I think my next posts will be improvements. I hope so anyway! @AlecTroemel I will work on getting RSS support added when I publish the upcoming entries - thanks for that feedback, It's a wonderful suggestion!

When I'm back to working on the project again more regularly, hopefully during the next month or two, I'd love to talk more about potential contributions! I recently added - https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs - into the mix. I had started on a Janet native module for the library, and then switched gears to focus on lower-level tasks. I think it's a good time to introduce this type of functionality into the project.

I really don't like the idea of forcing users to rely on an ECS, so I hope I can find some sort of abstraction to remove some of the pain around using them. My goal is to provide a bunch of default features that the user can replace with their own if desired. Flecs has a meta module which allows one to define components at runtime and generates reflection data for them. This should eventually aid in the building of the editor. I think I can probably get away with some sort of spatial hierarchy using flecs, and expose an interface that feels similar to an object component design.

I'm diving down the rabbit hole again, so I'll end it here 😆. Thanks once again for the kind words from both of you! I hope you both are having amazing Februarys! I'll post another comment when the blog posts are up. Take care!

[zacharycarter]

Just a quick update - I recently added shadows and skeletal animation to the project. I plan on working on input and a player controller next. After I finish with those tasks, I'll most likely take a pause and write some more blog entries and work on getting a live version hosted. I'll post an update here when I do so.