MeltedForge

MeltedForge is game engine written in the C language. It was first started as a simple hobby engine. But slowly, the aim wasn't anymore to be a "hobby" engine. As a game engine, we want it to be like a proper 2d/3d game engine which can actually export fun and enjoyable games. We admit it sounds ambitious and like any other "wannabe" engine. But still we continue to work to make goal a reality.

The entire code is open sourced. The github repository is here. One of the main reason it is open sourced is first of all, we feel like open source projects is a great learning resource for other devs and secondly, the option for community suggestions is open. Which in our opinion, is a good thing since it helps pointing out bugs, certain inconsistencies and enrich ideas from various minds all over the world.

The point of this engine isn't to compete with industrial standard, and production ready game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine, but to serve the purpose of mini-studios and small indie devs, who prefer flexibility, bloat free options and lightweightedness of the engine.

Goals

We want to give our client developer 2 main options:

• Either create a game using the engine's editor
• Or, manually write your app natively in C/C++ by directly interacting with the engine's core.

We recommend the second option for devs who have prior experience with low-level systems and want more customization and flexibility without any useless bloat.

Current position

At the moment of writing this documentation, MeltedForge isn't quite matured yet. It has many faults and doesn't has basic engine features. So long story short, it is in it's young stage. Though it is also true that it is not a toy test engine either. It is for now, far from the likes of an industrial standard, production ready game engine like Unity, Godot, Unreal Engine, Cry engine, etc. but it is in the path of becoming a engine which can actually export games and applications.

Features of the engine as of now:

• Basic ECS
  • Basic scene management
  • Serialization/Deserialization of scene
  • Management of multiple entities
• Material system (with texture caching)
• Model loading (Only gltf 2.0 format)
• Editor level UI (Using cimgui)
  • Customization of the UI (By cimgui)
• Custom offscreen render targets
• Binary serializing & deserializing api
• Explicit shader resource control
• Explicit shader code control
• Can create shader pipelines with explicit control
• Skybox creation
  • Skybox generation from equirectangular image (.hdr format supported too!)
  • Irradiance map generation support (Diffuse IBL)
• Custom useful data structures
  • MFArray (A dynamic array which uses the heap)
  • MFHashMap (A unordered dynamic hashmap which uses the heap)
• Basic PBR support
  • IBL (Only diffuse currently)

Third party dependencies

The engine uses a few third party dependencies internally. They are:

• Slog (Custom logger by the same author. Repository here)
• Stb's single header utils (Single header utils by stb. Repository here)
• Glfw (Cross-platform windowing/util library. Repository here)
• Tracy (For profiling. Repository here)
• Assimp (Model loader. Repository here)
• CImGui (C bindings for Dear ImGui, a immediate mode UI renderer. Repository here)