drichelson / vu

Virtual Universe 3D Engine

Vu

Vu (Virtual Universe) is a 3D engine based on the modern programming language Go (Golang). Vu is composed of packages, detailed in GoDoc, and briefly summarized below.

Sub packages

• audio Positions and plays sounds in a 3D environment.
• audio/al OpenAL bindings. Links the audio layer and the sound hardware.
• device Links the application to native OS specific window and user events.
• load Asset loaders including models, textures, audio, shaders, and bitmapped fonts.
• math/lin Vector, matrix, quaternion, and transform linear math library.
• physics Repositions bodies based on simulated physics.
• render 3D drawing and graphics interface.
• render/gl Generated OpenGL bindings. Links rendering system to graphics hardware.
• render/gl/gen OpenGL binding generator.

Less essential, but potentially more fun packages are:

• eg Examples that both demonstrate and validate the vu engine.
• ai Behaviour Tree for autonomous units.
• grid Grid based random level generators. A-star and flow field pathfinding.
• synth Procedural generation utilities.
• tools/sdf Signed distance field converstion utility.

Installation

Ensure you have installed Go 1.6+:

go get -u github.com/gazed/vu

Now you can build and run examples:

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/gazed/vu/eg
go build .
./eg

Build Dependencies

• OS X: Objective C and C compilers (clang) from Xcode command line tools.
• Windows: C compiler (gcc) from mingw64-bit.

Runtime Dependencies

• OpenGL version 3.3 or later.
• OpenAL 64-bit version 2.1.

Building on Windows

• Vu has been built and tested on Windows using gcc from mingw64-bit. Mingw64 was installed to c:/mingw64.
  • Put OpenAL on the gcc library path by copying OpenAL32.dll to c:/mingw64/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/OpenAL32.dll
• 64-bit OpenAL for Windows machines is available at http://openal.org/downloads. Running the OpenAL installer results in a c:/Windows/System32/OpenAL32.dll.
• Building with Cygwin has not been attempted. It may have special needs.

Limitations

The engine and its packages include the essentials by design. In particular:

• There is no 3D editor.
• There is no networking package.
• Physics only handles boxes and spheres.
• The device layer interface provides only the absolute minimum from the underlying windowing system. Only OSX and Windows 7+ are currently supported.
• Rendering supports standard OpenGL 3.3 and later. OpenGL extensions are not used.
• The Windows platform is sometimes limited by the availability of OpenGL and OpenAL. Generally OpenGL issues are fixed by downloading manufacturer's graphic card drivers. However older laptops with Intel graphics don't always have OpenGL drivers.