Hello, I'm Fred ;-)
You probably know me from my synthesizer work. But I always wanted to be a game dev, and I'm not getting any younger, so here we are!
This repository is my attempt to give the community of hobby developers a basic but fully functional toolkit for building 2.5D games.
- DIE : the renderer and runtime, in
common/engine. - Waller : the map editor, in
editor/.
Waller is the real strength of the toolkit: a full Qt-based level editor for building maps for the engine.
The renderer is sorta unique. It's software-based and works a bit like a futuristic raycaster, I'm writing a paper about it to describe its inner in more details.
Also, it's not yet fully portable, since a lot of the core rendering code relies on SSE4 arithmetic. That said, it shouldn't be too hard to make a portable version with the tools available today.
This codebase ranges from pure SSE intrinsics for rasterizing, to fairly advanced C++ with seamless multithreading. It's a strange mix, of modern and retro tech, what I personally love and hopefully a good mix!
Waller (and the engine) is built on Qt 6 (Community/Open Source Edition), using the core, gui,
widgets and spatialaudio modules, with a C++17, SSE4-capable compiler. All four of these modules
are available under the LGPLv3 in the Community/Open Source edition, so they're free to use here
even though this project itself is MIT licensed.
Grab the Qt Online Installer and install Qt 6 with a
MinGW (or LLVM-MinGW) kit. Then just open editor/waller.pro in Qt Creator, pick that kit, and build.
If you also have MSYS2 installed, make sure Qt's own MinGW/LLVM-MinGW
binfolder (e.g.C:\Qt\Tools\llvm-mingw1706_64\bin) comes first in yourPATH— mixing MSYS2's toolchain in will break the link with libstdc++/libc++ ABI mismatches.
Install Qt 6 development packages (base, widgets and multimedia/spatial audio) plus a C++ toolchain:
- Ubuntu / Debian:
sudo apt install qt6-base-dev qt6-multimedia-dev qmake6 build-essential - Fedora:
sudo dnf install qt6-qtbase-devel qt6-qtmultimedia-devel gcc-c++ make
These give you everything needed to build from the command line. If you'd rather use the Qt Creator
IDE, also install qtcreator (Ubuntu/Debian) or qt-creator (Fedora).
Open editor/waller.pro (in Qt Creator, or via qmake/qmake6 followed by make/mingw32-make),
pick a kit using GCC, Clang or MinGW, and compile.
Bob's your uncle!
MANUAL.md describes how the renderer works: the basic objects (nodes, walls, sprites,
lights, doors, lifts...), lighting, fog and post effects.
The Doxygen-generated API reference lives in docs/ and can be viewed online at
marzac.github.io/die.
To regenerate it yourself, run doxygen Doxyfile from the docs/ folder.
This project is MIT licensed => I don't expect anything in return. I'm using it myself for my in-development indy game.
Feel free to fork it, have a go, build your own game with it, and have a blast. Just don't forget to credit my work ;-)
Never forget this is a hobby project for me. It's over two years of spare-time work, mostly to disconnect from the harder sides of life.
Hope you'll love it and have fun.
Take care, greetings from Bonn / Germany.
Fred.