New WebGL Game Engine in the oven

[BeardScript]

Hello dear devs! My name is Paul. I'm not sure if this the right place to do this but I'm gonna give it a shot. So... here it goes!

With my friend Edoardo we're creating a Game Engine using three.js for rendering and a node.js + webpack environment for development. It's an electron app, works on Windows, Mac and Linux and is fully extendable through a friendly and simple API. The idea behind this is to create a free tool that is not limited to the functionalities we can add to the editor. Anyone should be able to create editor extensions and publish them either for free or for profit. So, in other words, this could be a Game Engine if you install Game Engine extensions to it, or maybe a WebGL App creator of other sorts if you choose other extensions. We're focusing on the Game side at least for now. 

As you can see we're in front of something that has no name (yet), no clear purpose and looks like an outlaw which doesn't belong anywhere. So, for now at least, we're referring to it as The Rogue Engine, in search of a purpose and the cure for bad breath ? Will it find a name? Will it find the Rogue's Den where it belongs? Is Paul drunk? We don't know.

So yes, I'm here to help out the Rogue in its quest, looking for your feedback and ideas (or insults) of any kind. We'd like to build a tool we'd all want to use, and get a clue of which are the tools we should prioritise for the upcoming Alpha. Yes! There's an Alpha in the oven and we'd love for you to try it out. For now we're sharing content through my Twitter, at least until we can find The Rogue a name and some decent clothes to put it on Twitter, Facebook and all those places where the cool kids hang out these days.

Thank you ?for enduring this horrible post to the end. You're a brave soldier, I hope you enjoy the video (preferably with a beer ?)

Cheers!
 

 

[sledgeman]

Helllo.

It looks really interesting ! And reminds me a lil bit to Unity. But this is good sign. Some questions that pops out of my mind:

- is it fully compatible with threejs ?
- are you able to manually update threejs ?
- what about "shader editor" ?
- what about "visual scripting" ?
- i guess it exports as a core html5 -webGL , but are there any automated publishing options to different devices maybe ?
- vector graphics support ?
- import formats ?
 

ok, i quit. It is to early to ask so many things. I understand it is in alpha-stage. Maybe you can share your thoughts & plans for the future. Would be great if you can
say that some of my questions are on your agenda. Thx & cheers.

 

 

 

 

[BeardScript]

Hi sledgeman. Thank you for the support. Your questions are very much welcome.
 

Quote

- is it fully compatible with threejs ?

More than compatible, I'd say that it "is" three.js with an engine around it. In fact, we decided against "rolling our own", in favour of a well known and battle tested rendering engine. The scene is a three.js object so you have all of its features at your disposal + engine related api and the component system which "proxies" some Object3d methods and ads a couple, without changing the state of the objects or "touching" the library.

 

Quote

- are you able to manually update threejs ?

We're still deciding this. Mainly because the engine uses three.js on the background and any change to the api, could easily break it. The good thing is that since our "extension" doesn't touch the library itself, for us it'd be quite trivial to update three.js and make the necessary changes, but it might be dangerous to give control over this to the user. Still, like you said, it's very early to tell.

 

Quote

- what about "shader editor" ?

This is among the first custom components we had in mind to build first. You have just pulled it up on the list ?
 

Quote

- what about "visual scripting" ?

This one is in our mid-long term scope, but here's why. We're focusing on extendibility, since we're hoping people will create more components and even better than ours. We hope that for whatever component we create someone will publish a far better extension, and since creating/publishing them (mark my words here) will be very simple, if there's a component missing, someone will create it. So, visual scripting might not be on the top of our list, but hopefully it might just be on someone else's.
 

Quote

- i guess it exports as a core html5 -webGL , but are there any automated publishing options to different devices maybe ?

The automated publishing is on our Trello board. It's still early, but we're planning on creating a publishing portal and a service to publish directly from the editor. I imagine something like a private cloud build, that you can make public.

 

Quote

- vector graphics support ?

Three has an SVG loader. It's all three.js on the rendering side so, If three.js can handle it, we can. Someone could even come up with an SVG editor window extension.
 

Quote

- import formats ?

Same as before, we use three.js file loaders. The only difference, of course, is that you just have to drag n drop the file, we handle the import code on the background.

Thanks for your questions, I hope I was able to clear most of your doubts. Any suggestion, feedback or requests are most welcome