Nim port

[zacharycarter]

Hi Joey!

Would you be open to a Nim port of this project? I'd like to also use BGFX as the rendering API rather than OpenGL.

If you're cool with the above - I'll probably get started this evening.

Thanks!

-Zach

[JoeyDeVries]

It's definitely interesting, but it would largely defeat the purpose of keeping everything bare-bones and simple (for understandability), so I don't think we can merge it properly into the main project without conflicting any of these interests. However, if you have a forked modified version built on Nim I'd love to reference it from this project's readme.

[zacharycarter]

I'd be totally fine with it living separately. There are two motivating reasons, behind my ask -

1) There are very few large, easy-to-understand, 3d rendering engines written in any language, and Cell is the best example I've found thus far. I think programmers who are interested in graphics programming, and the Nim programming language, would love a project that they can tear apart.

2) The BGFX community has been asking for an example of a higher level integration with BGFX, and I think a complete rendering engine, using the API, would be of great benefit to that community of graphics programmers.

I do intend to try to keep things simple and readable, as you have done with Cell.

Thanks for your input and I'll let you know how my progress goes!

On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 1:46 PM Joey de Vries notifications@github.com wrote:

It's definitely interesting, but it would largely defeat the purpose of keeping everything bare-bones and simple (for understandability), so I don't think we can merge it properly into the main project without conflicting any of these interests. However, if you have a forked modified version built on Nim I'd love to reference it from this project's readme.

— You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/JoeyDeVries/Cell/issues/9#issuecomment-349736255, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABIHSWuQUkqrjgzNYo5uP0CZnqvq4h5Dks5s9uDzgaJpZM4Q4Zac .

[JoeyDeVries]

Sounds great, and the motivations make a lot of sense. While originally intended to be easy-to-read, I did make quite a large number of modifications to the engine for portfolio-specific purposes (like the GI irradiance probes) that I normally wouldn't add to a project like this, so feel free to remove whatever feels unnecessarily bloated. I'll be going over the engine soon enough to process it to a version that better fits the original plan :)

Good luck, and definitely hit me up once it's at a close-to-finished state!

[zacharycarter]

Will do! Also, do you have any plans for creating an editor for Cell down the road? Maybe it'd be a project someone else could pick up? Just curious as to whether or not you already had one planned.

[JoeyDeVries]

Unfortunately, I'm mostly focusing on Vulkan work at the moment, so my next project will be a graphics engine/game built around Vulkan. This does mean I wont'be investing much more time into Cell aside from making stuff more readable/understandable.