Dreamcast-Talk.com

Hi everyone!

Today I'm publically announcing the Alpha release of a project I have been working on for several years(!).

Simulant is an open-source general-purpose game engine, written in C++ which supports building games for Windows, Linux and Dreamcast targets from a Linux development system (cross-compiling), and can also natively build on OSX. Android support is also in the works.

It's a full-blown 2D/3D game engine, with a bunch of features:

- Multiple renderers (OpenGL 1.1 and OpenGL 2.1)
- High-level Scene management
- Powerful material system, supporting GLSL on GL 2.x
- Hierarchical scene building
- Scriptable particle system (custom JSON format)
- Support for loading .obj and .md2 meshes, as well as Tiled .tmx files
- Complex configurable rendering pipeline
- Easy-to-use API
- Automatic memory management of game assets
- Automatic level-of-detail mesh selection
- Combination Spatial hash and Octree based culling systems
- Built-in realistic Newtonian physics engine
- Entity behaviour component system
- UI widget rendering system
- Built-in helpers for scrollable backgrounds, skyboxes and animated sprites
- OpenAL powered audio
- There's probably more I've forgotten...

And if that isn't enough, the whole thing is controllable from a simple command-line management command, which allows you to bootstrap projects, build them for multiple platforms, run unit tests, and package your game for Linux (flatpak) and Dreamcast (.CDI). Windows installer support is coming soon!

You don't even have to compile the game engine yourself, just install the the management command and it will download pre-compiled game engine libraries which are generated automatically via a complex build system!

If you want to find out more then head over to the following links:

The Simulant Website
Getting Started Tutorial
Documentation
Discord Chat
Code Repository
Issue Tracker

Reminder, this is Alpha software - it's unfinished, it's constantly changing, it's buggy in places, but that's why I need people to try things, report bugs, send patches and support me via Patreon.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Dang Kazade this looks sick!. How well optimized is the game engine for the Dreamcast Hardware? Does it utilize the PowerVR side of things, vector unit, etc?

The engine itself relies on OpenGL for graphics, which is why I had to build GLdc which leverages the PVR.

The vector math functions in the engine do make use of some of the vector unit instructions. Performance is OK, but it can be much better.

Here's an older video showing the built-in physics running on the DC: https://twitter.com/kazade/status/1046463133529853952

And here's my work-in-progress game running on a DC emulator too, although performance is pretty much the same on hardware: https://twitter.com/kazade/status/1041051595218321408

This is MASSIVE news. Christmas come a few days early. Congratulations is in order. I look forward to seeing some tech demos.

Will the engine have online functionality built in?

Bro, you need to post this over at Assembler mate! I can if you like? Going to post it over at Reddit too!

I've been trying to log in to assembler, looks like Google sign-in is down (I think I used to use this) and password reset isn't working :/

Thanks for posting on Reddit! I think the link is broken though

@Anonymouse There's no online functionality yet, but a network manager is planned (https://gitlab.com/simulant/simulant/issues/134)

EDIT: Finally got access to Assembler Games - I've duplicated this thread there

i in fact have used this engine, and i LOVE IT!

@kazade Link absolutely works mate, I used the reddit link to get here just not to type this to check lol.

Super excited to see what can be made with this engine! Keep up all the great work man!

Really good work kazade

Thanks!