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Timur Gafarov edited this page Jun 15, 2023 · 37 revisions

Dagon is a 3D game engine for D language based on OpenGL 4.0 and SDL2. It features deferred HDR renderer, PBR materials, an event manager, scene manager, asset manager, and entity-component model.

Project Goals

  1. Replacing DGL as an engine for Electronvolt. This means that Dagon is mainly targeted to first person action games, but nothing stops you from using it in a game of any genre.
  2. Implementing a modern, easy to use, extendable 3D game engine for D due to the lack of such. We believe that D is an excellent language for game development and it deserves more attention in this domain.
  3. Creating a use case for dlib for educational purposes.

The Name

Dagon is named after a god from H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos pantheon. This name was choosen in accordance with the community tradition of naming D projects using words beginning with 'd'.

Architecture

Dagon is a hierarchical component-based engine. At the root of the hierarchy there is an Application object. It stores one or multiple Scene objects. Each scene has its own assets and logics (event handlers). Scene stores Entity objects which are basic building blocks of the game world. Entity can be transformed, animated and rendered.

dlib

Dagon heavily relies on dlib. It is used everywhere in the engine, from memory management and vector math to file I/O and image decoding. Actually, as stated earlier, Dagon's secondary goal is to promote dlib and demonstrate its features.

Memory Management

Dagon doesn't use D's garbage collector and manages all of its data manually with New and Delete functions. You are also expected to do so. You still can use garbage collected data in Dagon, but this may result in weird bugs, so you are strongly recommended to do things our way. Most part of the engine is built around dlib's ownership model - every object belongs to some other object (owner), and deleting the owner will delete all of its owned objects. This allows semi-automatic memory management - you have to manually delete only root owner, which usually is an Application object. When creating objects, it is recommended to make scene's assetManager their owner.

Creating Assets

Dagon is a framework-style engine, meaning that it is controlled programmatically and doesn't provide you with an editor. How you will build your scenes is up to you. You can build them manually by loading models one by one in your code, create your own scene format, or export glTF scene from your 3D modeling software.

Currently Dagon supports loading glTF, OBJ and IQM models.

Extending

Dagon is written with extendability in mind, so you can easily add your own drawable objects, entity behaviours, shaders and asset loaders. Drawable can be anything you want - you can manually create meshes and animate them. With behaviours you can dynamically attach custom data and functionality to game entities. Materials can use custom GLSL shaders and parameters, and your asset loaders help Dagon understand files that you want to load from disk - these can be 3D models, levels, save files, etc.

Further Reading

See tutorials.