zicklag
commented
5 years ago Hey @indokan1945 good questions!
Answers
What is the vision of this game engine?
This is something that we need to get into the docs with a more formal definition as soon as possible, but here are some of the major motivations that will drive the vision:
- We need the engine to scale to a game of any size, even up to AAA games, with no technological bottleneck.
- The engine core should be written in Rust
- In order to make sure that engine performance is not a bottleneck, it needs to be written in a language that has multi-threading and that can integrate with native libraries.
- Rust allows full control while eliminating entire classes of bugs and preventing vulnerabilities and hard to debug issues.
- The engine core should be written in Rust
- We want the engine to be as easy to use and get started with as absolutely possible.
- Armory successfully hit a lot of good points on ease of use and Arsenal will take a lot of pointers from Armory in that respect. We want to take all of the best things about Armory's user experience and make sure that Arsenal is not at a disadvantage to Armory in that respect.
- We want to support visual scripting to allow non-programmers to make their own games.
- The engine should provide a full Blender integration where you build your game scenes in Blender and export them instantly to a game. ( Textual scripting initially will only be supported in an any external editor such as VSCode, however visual scripting we hope will be done directly within Blender )
- We want the engine to be efficient.
- The engine should, as much as possible, not use an absurd amount of system resources to run or develop games with.
- We want the engine to be usable by as many people as possible and on as many different computers as possible without compromising on the quality of the engine and its capabilities.
- The games in the engine should run on lower-end hardware as well as high-end hardware
- Even though Arsenal should be able to support super large games that require a lot of system resources, it should not be limited in its ability to create small lightweight games that run on less modern and/or lower resource hardware.
- The engine should, as much as possible, not use an absurd amount of system resources to run or develop games with.
- We want the engine to be mod-able.
- Modding is a very big deal to us, partially because modding was one of the major things that inspired us to want to make games in the first place. Allowing people to make games that can dynamically load user content is high on our priorities.
- We want the engine to be cross-platform
- The engine should be able to run on all of the major platforms including game consoles and the web:
- Windows
- Linux
- Mac
- Web
- Android
- iPhone
- PlayStation 4
- XBox One
- Nintendo Switch
- The engine should be able to run on all of the major platforms including game consoles and the web:
- We want the engine to be Open Source and built on Open Source tools so that anybody can contribute and/or modify the engine to their own use-case.
The engine should be able to compete with Unity, Unreal, Cryengine, etc. in the kinds of games you can create with it. It may or may not have all of the features of those game engines, though. The features that the engine comes with will be, at least initially, dependent on what we need to develop our own games at Katharos Technology. That doesn't mean that we won't support or integrate other features if somebody else wants to contribute them, and it doesn't mean that other features may not come later.
Even though the engine needs to be able to support large games, it should be easy to use and still be perfectly suitable for small indie games as well.
Is being cross platform one of your game engine's main focus?
Yes. Arsenal should be able to target every major target out there. This is going to be mostly handled by the Amethyst engine that we are building on top of so it should not be a large burden to the project.
Compared to Armory, Arsenal will probably have less of an issue targeting multiple platforms because we don't have to maintain the Krom ( development, JavaScript ) version of Armory games and the C/C++ version of Armory games, which was what caused so much of a difficulty with the Bullet physics integration. Arsenal will have one version that can be used for production and for development so we won't have to manage two different runtimes. WASM support for Amethyst is also being sponsored by Mozilla right now.
Also, because it is written in Rust, Arsenal shouldn't have any problem integrating with native libraries on different targets, something that gave Armory a bit of trouble because of Krom.
What platform will your engine focus on?
To start we will focus on the desktop platforms: Linux, Windows, and Mac. After that we will want to go to consoles. This is in the roadmap for the Amethyst project so we may not need to do any work on this ourselves.
What dimension will your game engine focus on?
3D will be the most important for us at first but it should not be hard to add extra controls that allow you to more easily create purely 2D elements after that. We definitely want you to be able to do both.
If we start with 3D, 2.5D is more of a special case of the physics engine, because it is 3D graphics, with 2D physics. The rust nphysics library supports both 2D and 3D physics so that might end up being easy to accomplish.
Supporting pure 2D should just be a matter of rendering and making the UX inside of Blender easy enough to place 2D objects so that might also be an easy feature to add when we get to it.
What will your game engine feature?
That is less clear at the present time. We will start by focusing on the core elements needed to make any game and on giving the developer enough control to work anything that they might need into their game. More specific features like terrain and AI editors would be great to work in eventually, but our development effort will be guided by the features that we need to develop our own games.
We should have no problem accepting contributions for extra features as long as we deem it compliant to our standards.
When do you intend to release the first version? (1.0)
We have no way of determining an accurate timeline at this point. It will definitely be more of a "work on it until we feel it is stable". But as it is critical to our own game development, it will have the highest of priorities.
We are going to develop a "living" roadmap that we will update as we figure out what we need to work into the engine. Initially it will likely be rather inaccurate until we figure out more of what needs to be worked into Arsenal and into Amethyst.
How do you support your game engine development?
Development of Arsenal is a part of the work of Katharos Technology as it will be the engine that we use to make our games. Work at Katharos Technology is funded by trusting God to provide for what we need to continue work. Donations are welcome.
We do not know where funding for the project will come from as the project continues; we are trusting that God will give us what we need to continue the project if that is His will. We will never charge for Arsenal, though. Arsenal will be free and Open Source from the start.
See our about us page to understand more about what our goal is as an organization.
What will be your game engine license?
The current plan is for the engine to be licensed under MIT, but the ownership of the copyright will be reserved by Katharos Technology. That means that contributors have to sign a CLA and that we may re-license the engine under any other license that we choose if we need to for any reason. This is to protect us, as an organization, from putting a legal restriction on our use of our own software that we may regret later. We have the full intention of always providing the software under a free and Open Source license; part of what we want to accomplish with Katharos Technology is to give people the tools they need to make their own games.
Edit note: At first we were going to dual license under MIT and Apache, but we switched to just MIT.
Notes
Engine Development
The development of the engine will be heavily directed by the need that we have for the engine at Katharos Technolgy. This means that we may not be able to facilitate developing features for everybody's use-cases, but it does mean that we have a vested interest in making the engine capable of producing high quality commercial games.
If other people want to contribute features that we may not have time to work on ourselves, there should be no reason that we cannot merge those features if they fit our vision.
Engine Design
In reality, even though we call Arsenal an engine, the plan is to build Arsenal almost entirely on top of the Amethyst game engine while creating our own Blender based user experience. We have the documentation for the engine design here.
I hope that gives you a good idea of what we are trying to accomplish! Let us know if you have any other questions. :+1:
opax7
Hi, I looked at your http://forums.armory3d.org/t/rust-and-the-vision-of-armory/3146/ and I agreed most of your views on Armory3D, and your basic concept of this game engine. I'm kinda interested and if I found out we have same vision I may give a hand on development of this engine. Hence, I have some questions: