The-Forge VS Cocos2d

Oh, I forgot a few major ones:

https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge was used in No Man's Sky, Hades and Starfield.

https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics is the physics engine in Horizon Forbidden West.

To my understanding, every source I've read says that this should cause issues, but in practice it doesn't. What gives? Did I miss something? Here are multiple examples using the latter approach.

This is a toy project that I've been working on for the past few months. Essentially, I've rewritten all the rendering code for the engine using BGFX. This means that all the fixed function OpenGL 1.2 code has been removed from the engine. BGFX supports OpenGL 3.3 and DirectX11, but there are still some rendering artifacts with DirectX11, so the engine still uses OpenGL when running on Windows. I've been considering switching to The Forge (https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge) if I want to have more control over the rendering pipeline. However, this is a complex topic with significant implications for the codebase. I've already done the hard work of eliminating clumsy abstractions in the engine and simplifying the render pipeline, so it's just a matter of deciding what direction I want to take.

The-Forge might fit:

So, I'm not sure if it is widely known, that Starfield is going to be running on a lot of "The Forge." The creators of The Forge says it was added to Creation Kit in 2019. This will open a LOT of new systems for Bethesda games.

That's all I can really tell you from what you've posted. The original version without the Blowfish encryption is open source (eg. https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-x/blob/v4/cocos/scripting/lua-bindings/manual/CCLuaStack.cpp) , and I don't really understand how why you have so much symbol information available if what you're trying to disassemble isn't also probably open source

As others have pointed out, the biggest difference you're seeing is likely due to the _version_ of OpenGL (and hence GLSL) version. That said, there are still important differences. I'd recommend looking at a comparison between the same shader in a project that supports both OpenGL & OpenGLES. For example, here's a shader from cocos2d-x https://github.com/cocos2d/cocos2d-x/blob/v4/cocos/renderer/shaders/positionColor.vert. Note the only difference in this case is the additional precision qualifier (lowp) for v_fragmentColor. Note too how cocos uses preprocessor macros to handle this, so they don't have to maintain separate shader sources. Depending on your goals, you might be interested in tools like Nvidia cg or nvFX that allow for creating shaders in a dialect agnostic way, but ymmv.

Speaking about markdown files on GitHub, I know that there are some repositories that have very stunning README markdown files, such as this one for Cocos2d-x, whcih includes images in conjunction with text. I might do the same for my repository as well. Considering VS Code have an extension for .md files, this might come in handy when I consider using VS Code to contribute to my game projects.