Feature Guide

This is a brief introduction to the Cubos engine and its features. Before diving into the documentation of each class and function, it's recommended to read through this guide.

Overview

The Cubos engine is divided into two libraries: Core and Engine. Each library has its own namespace, which corresponds to a sub-folder in the include path.

Core provides platform abstraction, containers, utilities, and the ECS module. Engine builds on top of Core and provides higher-level features such as rendering and collisions.

The core library is divided into modules, each of which covers a specific area of functionality. For example, graphics-related functionality is on the cubos::core::gl namespace, under the include path cubos/core/gl.

The engine library is divided into plugins, each of which extends the engine's functionality in some way. You'll learn more about plugins below. For each plugin, there is a corresponding directory in the include path. Categories of plugins are also divided into sub-folders, with their own namespaces.

Tooling

Other than the core and engine libraries, the project also contains Quadrados and Tesseratos. Quadrados is a CLI tool which contains utilities used during game development. Tesseratos is our in-house editor, which is still in its early stages of development.

Learn more

The following guides explain basic concepts of the engine. Its recommend to read through these first to understand the overall principles and only then dive into the documentation of each class and function.

  • ECS - What is an ECS and how it's used in Cubos
  • Plugins - What are plugins and how they can be used to organize your code.
  • Queries - In-depth guide on writing queries.
  • Quadrados - How to use the Quadrados CLI tool.

What we don't have and where are we going

The engine is still in its early stages of development, and thus we're missing a lot of features. For example, we don't have rigid body physics yet, and the editor tools are very bare bones. There's no scripting language, thus you will have to write all your game logic in C++.

Making a game with the engine is still very painful. Our goal is to make Cubos usable for game jams by people who are not on the team. This means a lot of work, but we're confident we can get there.