Mechtatel

Mechtatel (ru: Мечтатель en: Dreamer)

Мечтай до тех пор, пока не узнаешь, что давно пора повзрослеть и бросить эту фигню.

Overview

This project aims to create a Vulkan-based game engine in Java with help of LWJGL. It's still far from what you call a game engine, but I'll keep on developing little by little in my free time. Leave a star in this repo if you like it!

Mechtatel is a word that means "Dreamer" in Russian. It's by far the best word to describe me, only dreaming and being far from any achivements. God knows if I could complete this work by the time you'd think I'm no more...

Motivation

It's been years since I came up with an idea like "Isn't it great if I could create a game engine and build my own game upon it?" If you just want to create a game, then you should take advantage of the great game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine. As for me, I simply love to write code, and want to develop a game starting from the lowest level possible.

I've been a big fan of a good old game called X operations. It's a shooter game developed for Windows and first released in 2003. I always have this game in mind when developing the Mechtatel engine, thinking about what kind of features will be required to develop a modernized cross-platform version of it. Its somewhat cheap taste of 20-year-old gameplay still captivates me.

Requirements

• Java ≥ 21
• Vulkan ≥ 1.0
  • Current default for this engine is Vulkan 1.3
  • Configurable via settings.json
  • Specifying older version of Vulkan API reports a validation error when using Slang shaders

Supported platforms

Platform	Tested
Linux x64	Yes
Linux arm64	No
Windows x64	Yes
macOS arm64	No

Support for Linux arm64 is partly tested on a g5g.xlarge instance of AWS EC2.

Try it out!

Core

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.github.maeda6uiui</groupId>
        <artifactId>mechtatel-core</artifactId>
        <version>0.4.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.github.maeda6uiui</groupId>
        <artifactId>mechtatel-platform-pack-linux</artifactId>
        <version>0.4.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.github.maeda6uiui</groupId>
        <artifactId>mechtatel-logging</artifactId>
        <version>0.4.1</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

mechtatel-platform-pack-linux module loads platform-dependent dependencies for Linux x64. You have to change it according to your target platform.

Platform	Module name
Linux x64	mechtatel-platform-pack-linux
Linux arm64	mechtatel-platform-pack-linux-arm64
Windows x64	mechtatel-platform-pack-windows
macOS arm64	mechtatel-platform-pack-macos-arm64

pom.xml in the mechtatel-hello project might be a good starting point if you want to dynamically load a platform-pack module according to the target platform.

Use of mechtatel-logging module is optional. It provides minimal logging functionality with Logback, which prints out logs above the INFO level to stdout. You can overwrite it or use another logging implementation at your discretion.

Audio

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.github.maeda6uiui</groupId>
        <artifactId>mechtatel-audio</artifactId>
        <version>0.4.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.github.maeda6uiui</groupId>
        <artifactId>mechtatel-audio-natives-linux</artifactId>
        <version>0.4.1</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

mechtatel-audio module provides audio playback functionality for various audio formats including MP3 and FLAC. The core part is written in Rust and mechtatel-audio works as an interface to the underlying native library. It can be used independently from mechtatel-core.

As with the mechtatel-core module, you have to add a platform-dependent module to dependencies according to the target platform.

Platform	Module name
Linux x64	mechtatel-audio-natives-linux
Linux arm64	mechtatel-audio-natives-linux-arm64
Windows x64	mechtatel-audio-natives-windows
macOS arm64	mechtatel-audio-natives-macos-arm64

Documentation

Unfortunately, there are no elaborate documents for this project so far. However, you could still check out the test code and hopefully get to know what Mechtatel has to offer!

Settings

You can change some values pertaining to this engine via settings.json. Its default location is "./Mechtatel/settings.json", but you could rename it as per your need.

Below is an excerpt from a test code. You pass the filepath of the setting file to the MttSettings.load method.

public SpotlightTest(MttSettings settings) {
    super(settings);
    this.run();
}

public static void main(String[] args) {
    MttSettings
            .load("./Mechtatel/settings.json")
            .ifPresentOrElse(
                    SpotlightTest::new,
                    () -> logger.error("Failed to load settings")
            );
}

Todo

• Reflection mapping
• Water surface

Special thanks to

• Vulkan Tutorial
• Vulkan-Tutorial-Java
• 3D Game Development with LWJGL 3

Screenshots

Some basic primitives

Physics objects

Spotlights

Shadow mapping

Skeletal animation

ImGui

Rendering to multiple windows