🚧🚧🚧 NO LONGER IN DEVELOPMENT 🚧🚧🚧

cFlake Engine

cFlake Engine is a free and open-source Rust game engine that I was working on for the past 2 years as a personal project (2021-2023).

I eventually stopped working on this project since the codebase became too bloated and due to an internal bug in wgpu which would have to force me to rewrite my whole rendering API as it is right now. (more specifically it's due to me being dumb and trying to get away and using shaderc to compile my glsl shaders to shove into wgpu instead of using naga)

I've learned a ton of stuff about rust, graphics, and engine development whilst writing and working on this engine. Will keep this repository open just to showcase it as a semi working project but I don't intend to fix the current codebase In the near future if I decide to pick this up again it will most likely be a completely different engine.

Main features of cFlake:

• 7 World Event Variants, Systems, and Resources all accessible within the World struct
• Deterministic event sorting through multiple stages with the help of petgraph
• Archetypal multithreaded ECS built to be used in conjunction with the World Events and Systems
• Custom Graphics API built on top of WGPU
• GPU Voxel Generation and Octree Terrain, with async CPU readback support
• Asynchronous asset loader using Rayon threads
• Input handling with gamepad support (gilrs) and keybinding serialization / deserialization
• Custom sound support through CPAL

State of each crate:

Legend

• ❌ = TODO
• 🚧 = WIP, not complete
• ⚠️ = Semi complete, needs finishing touches
• ✅ = complete

Crates

• World: ✅
• Utils: ⚠️
• Terrain: 🚧
• Graphics: 🚧
• Rendering: 🚧
• Networking: ❌
• Physics: 🚧
• Math: 🚧
• Input: ✅
• ECS: ✅
• Asset loader: ✅
• Audio: 🚧
• GUI (eGUI): ⚠️

Main links

• YouTube Development Channel
• Trello dashboard

Examples

Examples are in the examples folder, but here is a quick and dirty setup to get you started (literally just the hello example)

use cflake_engine::prelude::*;

// An empty game window
fn main() {
    App::default()
        .insert_init(init)
        .insert_update(update)
        .execute();
}

// Function that gets executed when the engine starts
fn init(world: &mut World) {
    println!("Hello World!");
}

// Function that gets executed every frame
fn update(world: &mut World) {
    println!("Hello Frame!");
}

Scene Architecture & Design

cFlake engine uses an ECS (Entity, Component, System) architecture. This architecture is mostly used by new and modern game engines to be able to easily use of highly parallel code that can benefit from multithreading. The same goes for cFlake engine. The ECS architectures is split into 3 (and a half) main parts, Entities, Components, Prefabs, and Systems.

Entities

Entities could be though of as a simple handle to some underlying data stored within the world scene. Entities by themselves do not store any data, and they can be represented using a u64 integer handle.

They act a pointer of some sort that will fetch data from somewhere else. This alleviates the problem of having random data scattered in memory and having separate handles for them and such.

Entities can be created and destroyed using the Scene resource that is automatically added into the world. More so, entities can have data linked to them through Components. An entity could have up to 32 components linked to it at the same time (if the "extend-bitmasks" feature is enabled, this gets bumped up to 64 max components)

Components

Components are what actually store the data for a specified entity. Components are all stored within an Archetype, which is a deisng/optimization that certain ECS implementation use for faster iteration speeds at the cost for slower insertion / removal speeds. Components can be inserted into the scene using the Scene::insert() function, which takes in a Bundle parameter that contains a tuple of different components. Components can also be removed from entities using EntryMut, which is a mutable access to an entity's components directly.

To actually handle modifying data related to components, one must use a scene Query that would iterate over all the given components of the given Bundle tuple type. They could be accessed as long as you have a mutable or immutable reference to the Scene resource (depending on what type of query you wish to use)

Prefabs

Prefabs are basically pre-bundled components that can be instantiated any time into the world. You can take any Bundle and store it within the Scene as a prefab with a specific name ID that identifies it. So whenever you want to instantiate it you just need to call scene.instantiate(name) where name is the name of the prefab you wish to instantiate. This method will return you an Option<EntryMut> because it might fail. You can take the EntryMut and modify the newly instantiated entity's components with it

Systems

This is where things get tricky however, and this is where my implementation of ECS starts to differ from the pure ECS implementation. In this engine, Systems are just containers that store multiple Events, and these events get fired off whenever something interesting happens, like the start of a frame or during engine initialization. For now, we have 7 types of events and they go as follow:

1. We have the Init events that get fired off at the very start of the application during initialization of the world. This even can be used to add static objects to the world that will live for the lifetime of the game

2. Tick and Update events occur right after the other (in batch) during the execution of the program. The Update events get executed for each frame that gets displayed, and the Tick systems execute exactly N times per second (idk what number it should be at the moment, either 32 or 64). There is a field on the Time resource that allows you to see how many ticks will be executed and how many ticks have currently been executed in total

3. DeviceEvent and WindowEvent and events simply passed from Winit. Their ordering is dependant on how Winit handles them (I think)

4. Shutdown events occur at the very end of the program when the user closes the application normally

The ordering between the different types of app flow systems goes as follows: Initialization: Init systems Running: Update systems, then Tick systems End: Shutdown systems

Graphics (story time)

At the moment, cFlake uses a custom built graphics API abstraction that wraps over WGPU and ShaderC. This however, was a recent change (~4 months in the making) due to limitations with the original backend (OpenGL) the engine. I had realized that OpenGL was not going to scale well with all the new multi-threaded features that I've implemented like a multithreaded asset loader and multithreaded ECS system. After tinkering with Vulkan (raw Vulkan, Vulkano), I decided to not use it (even after I pathetically tried to implement it, which took me 2-3 months), I decided to use Wgpu, since I simply could not cope with the manual state tracking of Vulkan. Nonetheless, the new graphics API allows us to create objects (like textures/buffers/shaders) in other threads. THis allows us to load texture/mesh assets asynchronously.

Asset Managment

Currently, there are a few way to load in external assets (and to ship them) within your binary to be able to make your published executables more portable. There is a an Assets resource that is automatically added to the world that allows you to load and deserialize assets from the file system or pre-defined persistent assets.

In this engine, assets are defined as structs that can be deserialized and loaded from raw binary data (that is most probably file binary data). You can customize how assets are loaded in within the engine using the Asset trait, and you can implement it on any structure that can be deserialized from a raw stream of bytes.

You can define a "Context" and "Settings" that can be used to customize how each asset is loaded. Asset deserialization must be faillible, and due to that restriction, I made it so you must define an Error type that gets returned whenever asset conversion fails. There is also asnychronous asset loading supported within the engine, and this is implemented using the AsyncAsset trait that gets automatically gets implemented for Assets that are Sync + Send and have their Settings + Context be Sync and Send. So assets can be automatically loaded as asynchronous assets if they fit those requirements.

The project can also be built using the "pack-assets" feature which will force to store the assets data bytes directly into the executable for shipping. A better solution to this would be to do proper asset packing to save space and compile time.

For now, these are the types of assets that are loadable/deseriazable by default and their respective extensions.

• Texture2D: .png, .jpg
• glTF scene: .gltf, .glb
• 3D mesh: .obj
• AudioClip: .wav, .mp3
• Vertex Shader: .vert
• Fragment Shader: .frag
• Compute Shader: .comp
• Raw GLSL (only for includes): .glsl
• Raw UTF8 text: .txt

Input Management

Input is currently being handled using a custom wrapper around gilrs and Winit's Events. You can "bind" or "map" a keyboard button or mouse click to a specific binding and then check each frame if it had been pressed, released, or been held (which means the user did not let go of it since last frame). The Input resource cannot be used within Tick events since it relies on frame to frame data, and Tick events can execute each multiple times per frame or none at all. If you wish to run frame-rate indepedent logic using the tick system you must fetch the inputs using a separate update system and save those inputs persistently, either using entities or resources, then fetch them in your tick method to apply them.

Examples Controls

• Toggle debug UI: P
• Move Camera: WASD,
• Move Camera Up: Space,
• Move Camera Down: Left Control,
• Increase Camera Base Speed: Left Shift,
• Reset Camera Location: R,
• Zoom in / Zoom out: Z, X (respectively)
• Toggle Camera Controller: H,
• Camera Rotation: Mouse Up/Down/Left/Right

Thanks to:

• Lionel Stanway (MoldyToeMan)
• Logan McLennan (PigSteel)
• Dimev (Skythedragon)
• The whole Graphics Programming and Rust Language discord servers for their helpful tips and help when it comes to graphics and engine programming!
• The "examples/assets/user/scenes/untitled2.glb" file comes from the Graphics Programming server itself! Thanks Deccer! deccer cubes!!
• Poly Haven for their awesome textures and models (used in examples folder)

LICENSE

Dual-Licensed under

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.