keaton-freude / nimbleengine

Info

Only tested on Ubuntu 18.x, no support for anything but that.

Required Packages

Ubuntu

Following packages/tools are needed to build the project (there may be more, but at least these):

meson ninja libglfw3-dev libglew-dev libglm-dev libassimp-dev libfmt-dev libspdlog-dev

Windows

Recommended to use vcpkg to manage your installed libraries. The following are the packages required

Packages

vcpkg install fmt:x64-windows glew:x64-windows glfw3:x64-windows spdlog:x64-windows glm:x64-windows assimp:x64-windows

vcpkg CMake integration

With vcpkg installed and integrated into system -- vcpkg integrate install -- simply supply the path to the cmake toolchain file.

This script should be located at: ${VC_ROOT}\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake where ${VC_ROOT} is thte root directory of your vcpkg installation

To supply this to cmake, append DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE to your cmake -G invocation. From there, build project how you wish: either through Visual Studio or by running cmake --build .

Rough Docs/Ideas

Material System

The material system is split into two main ideas: Material Templates and Material Instances.

A Material template is defined as a collection of settings with either constant, or varying, values. For example, a very simple diffuse texture Material Template might have the following settings:

• Diffuse Texture
  • This is the texture for the color channel of the rendered object
  • This setting has a default setting pointing to the debug texture
  • User must specify the resource name, relative to the texture look-up location
• Lighting Enabled
  • Should this object receive lighting (and thus be shaded)?
  • This setting has a default setting which is true

A Material Instance, is a copy of a Material Template. Any setting without a default value must be resolved by the user of the material. Users should have a generic method of looking up a setting by name and providing a value. Type checking must occur when setting the value.

Attempting to bind a material to the pipeline while required settings are not yet resolved yields an immediate trap.

DrawableNode will only accept Material Instances. Material Instances can be shared across multiple DrawableNode, with the understanding that modifying one will modify another (typical pointer/ref behavior).

Material Instances should be Cloneable, which allows the creation of a new MaterialInstance -- with the current applied settings -- detached from the original MaterialInstance

MaterialTemplates reside in the resource directory, under the material-templates sub-folder. They are JSON-encoded files.

MaterialInstances reside in memory only. In the future, saving a MaterialInstance will be possible. Along with the ability to easily create new instances and modify their values from an editor.