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Full disclosure: I am the creator of the project. Wikipedia at least, defines a game engine to be "a software framework designed for the creation and developme

by slimsag 12y ago

Full disclosure: I am the creator of the project. Wikipedia at least, defines a game engine to be "a software framework designed for the creation and development of video games" and goes on to say "The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, and a scene graph.". Azul3D has a rendering engine, and a soon-to-be-released 3D audio engine. Go provides networking, streaming, memory management, threading, and a few Go packages provide localization support. Azul3D also provides 2D physics (through Chipmunk 2D), with 3D physics (provided by Bullet) coming soon. Arguably scripting is not needed, Go has very "scripting-language" like syntax. But you could use the various Go bindings for scripting languages out there today (Lua, Python, etc). Azul3D doesn't have any support for animation yet -- but in the near future it will receive a Blender model loader with support for 3D animated models. AI and scene graph libraries will surely be developed over time. I agree that the engine isn't ready for serious 3D games yet, more work still needs to be done for that to happen as I've already stated. Perhaps right now it just looks like a graphics engine -- but in the future it will get better I promise. Yes, there aren't any game demos yet. These things take time. Do note that Go's image package allows decoding png/jpeg/gif images (and probably others, as well). Loading 3D models is coming soon. Concurrency could be incredibly useful in games -- I'm a bit shocked that you'd say otherwise. Imagine having a single goroutine perform decisive actions for an in-game NPC etc. With Go you can literally have thousands of goroutines running at the same time (like coroutines -- only better). I enjoy the criticism nonetheless, it lets me know where I am and where I need to be. Thank you.

dualogy 12y ago
> With Go you can literally have thousands of goroutines running at the same time (like coroutines -- only better) I've been coding Go for some 2 years and I can tell you it does not magically provide your machine with thousands of extra cores so "at the SAME time" is precisely speaking exactly inaccurate. I love coroutines but they're still multi-plexed onto OS threads and they don't all run as massively parallel as you suggested.
- orionhenry 12y ago
  but your code written as if they were all executing at the same time
tinco 12y ago
Hi! Sorry if I came across a bit harshly, it wasn't meant as a criticism of the project itself. Your project is obviously awesome and very complete already. I meant it more as a warning to new developers who are looking for a framework/engine to build a game with. If all you see is positive things about this engine, you might not realize that there's proper game engines out there like Unity/UE4 and a whole bunch of open source ones that allow you to work in nice high level scripting languages and introduce you to serious game development as well. I've no doubt that if you keep up the good work on this project, and perhaps pick up some nice contributors along the way you'll have a perfect game engine for go enthousiasts. Especially if you already have a game you're using it for right now. About the concurrency: Yes it can be nice, especially if it's nice and abstracted (no messing about with mutexes and such), but there's very often no real reason to do it. Imagine having a single method that iterates over your NPC's and calls their calculateDecision function. If it's a simple decision you could have hundreds of them doing it every few frames, and never worries about context switching costs or the cost of communicating immutable versions of your gamestate and all that jazz. A regular modern computer has only two to 4 cores, you can have one thread running the physics for the next frame, and another doing state calculations, where's the need for having thousands of goroutines? Of course, when computers actually start having tens of cores, and/or your game state really is divisible in a multitude of uncorrelated calculations, then yes at some point nice concurrency can be cool. Anyway, good luck and I'm really looking forward to seeing the first game that comes out of your engine/framework :)
- eikenberry 12y ago
  Remember that concurrency is not parallelism. Concurrency is an abstraction and organization mechanism that works great irregardless of the number of cores. I personally am a big fan of CSP and love developing programs as a collection of collaborating services. I do mostly systems programming so can not say how good a fit it would be for most game programming, but it is a good general pattern that seems like it would work.

by slimsag 12y ago

dualogy 12y ago

> With Go you can literally have thousands of goroutines running at the same time (like coroutines -- only better) I've been coding Go for some 2 years and I can tell you it does not magically provide your machine with thousands of extra cores so "at the SAME time" is precisely speaking exactly inaccurate. I love coroutines but they're still multi-plexed onto OS threads and they don't all run as massively parallel as you suggested.

orionhenry 12y ago
but your code written as if they were all executing at the same time

tinco 12y ago

Hi! Sorry if I came across a bit harshly, it wasn't meant as a criticism of the project itself. Your project is obviously awesome and very complete already. I meant it more as a warning to new developers who are looking for a framework/engine to build a game with. If all you see is positive things about this engine, you might not realize that there's proper game engines out there like Unity/UE4 and a whole bunch of open source ones that allow you to work in nice high level scripting languages and introduce you to serious game development as well. I've no doubt that if you keep up the good work on this project, and perhaps pick up some nice contributors along the way you'll have a perfect game engine for go enthousiasts. Especially if you already have a game you're using it for right now. About the concurrency: Yes it can be nice, especially if it's nice and abstracted (no messing about with mutexes and such), but there's very often no real reason to do it. Imagine having a single method that iterates over your NPC's and calls their calculateDecision function. If it's a simple decision you could have hundreds of them doing it every few frames, and never worries about context switching costs or the cost of communicating immutable versions of your gamestate and all that jazz. A regular modern computer has only two to 4 cores, you can have one thread running the physics for the next frame, and another doing state calculations, where's the need for having thousands of goroutines? Of course, when computers actually start having tens of cores, and/or your game state really is divisible in a multitude of uncorrelated calculations, then yes at some point nice concurrency can be cool. Anyway, good luck and I'm really looking forward to seeing the first game that comes out of your engine/framework :)

eikenberry 12y ago
Remember that concurrency is not parallelism. Concurrency is an abstraction and organization mechanism that works great irregardless of the number of cores. I personally am a big fan of CSP and love developing programs as a collection of collaborating services. I do mostly systems programming so can not say how good a fit it would be for most game programming, but it is a good general pattern that seems like it would work.