stb
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stb | bgfx | |
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164 | 71 | |
25,008 | 14,251 | |
- | - | |
6.7 | 9.3 | |
2 days ago | 7 days ago | |
C | C++ | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License |
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stb
- Lessons learned about how to make a header-file library (2013)
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Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
Have you considered not using an engine at all, in favor of libraries? There are many amazing libraries I've used for game development - all in C/C++ - that you can piece together:
* General: [stb](https://github.com/nothings/stb)
- STB: Single-file public domain libraries for C/C++
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Writing a TrueType font renderer
Great to see more accessible references on font internals. I have dabbled on this a bit last year and managed to have a parser and render the points of a glyph's contour (I stopped before Bezier and shape filling stuff). I still have not considered hinting, so it's nice that it's covered. What helped me was an article from the Handmade Network [1] and the source of stb_truetype [2] (also used in Dear ImGUI).
[1] https://handmade.network/forums/articles/t/7330-implementing....
[2] https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h
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Capturing the WebGPU Ecosystem
So I read through the materials on mesh shaders and work graphs and looked at sample code. These won't really work (see below). As I implied previously, it's best to research/discuss these sort of matters with professional graphics programmers who have experience actually using the technologies under consideration.
So for the sake of future web searchers who discover this thread: there are only two proven ways to efficiently draw thousands of unique textures of different sizes with a single draw call that are actually used by experienced graphics programmers in production code as of 2023.
Proven method #1: Pack these thousands of textures into a texture atlas.
Proven method #2: Use bindless resources, which is still fairly bleeding edge, and will require fallback to atlases if targeting the PC instead of only high end console (Xbox Series S|X...).
Mesh shaders by themselves won't work: These have similar texture access limitations to the old geometry/tessellation stage they improve upon. A limited, fixed number of textures still must be bound before each draw call (say, 16 or 32 textures, not 1000s), unless bindless resources are used. So mesh shaders must be used with an atlas or with bindless resources.
Work graphs by themselves won't work: This feature is bleeding edge shader model 6.8 whereas bindless resources are SM 6.6. (Xbox Series X|S might top out at SM 6.7, I can't find an authoritative answer.) It looks like work graphs might only work well on nVidia GPUs and won't work well on Intel GPUs anytime soon (but, again, I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this authoritatively). Furthermore, this feature may have a hard dependency on using bindless to begin with. That is, I can't tell if one is allowed to execute a work graph that binds and unbinds individual texture resources. And if one could do such a thing, it would certainly be slower than using bindless. The cost of bindless is paid "up front" when the textures are uploaded.
Some programmers use Texture2DArray/GL_TEXTURE_2D_ARRAY as an alternative to atlases but two limitations are (1) the max array length (e.g. GL_MAX_ARRAY_TEXTURE_LAYERS) might only be 256 (e.g. for OpenGL 3.0), (2) all textures must be the same size.
Finally, for the sake of any web searcher who lands on this thread in the years to come, to pack an atlas well a good packing algorithm is needed. It's harder to pack triangles than rectangles but triangles use atlas memory more efficiently and a good triangle packing will outperform the fancy new bindless rendering. Some open source starting points for packing:
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Www Which WASM Works
The STB headers are mostly built like that: https://github.com/nothings/stb
You could also add an optional 'convenience API' over the lower-level flexible-but-inconvenient core API, as long as core library can be compiled on its own.
In essence it's just a way to decouple the actually important library code from runtime environment details which might be better implemented outside the C/C++ stdlib.
It's already as simple as the stdlib IO functions not being asynchrononous while many operating systems provide more modern alternatives. For a specific type of library (such an image decoder) it's often better to delegate such details to the library user instead of circumventing the stdlib and talking directly to OS APIs.
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File for Divorce from LLVM
My stuff for instance:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol
...inspired by:
https://github.com/nothings/stb
But it's not so much about the build system, but requiring a separate C/C++ compiler toolchain (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless the proposal is implemented).
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What C libraries do you use the most?
STB Libraries: https://github.com/nothings/stb
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[Noob Question] How do C programmers get around not having hash maps?
stb_ds is also very popular.
- Is there an existing multidimensional hash table implementation in C?
bgfx
- WebKit Switching to Skia for 2D Graphics Rendering
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Is it possible and realistic to learn independent of an API?
Sort of, I'd recommend a modern higher level API. I'm not sure what the current recommended ones are (probably bgfx), but assuming the wrapper is "low level enough", then the concepts you learn are still going to apply.
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Ask HN: Released games built on FOSS engines?
https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx for just that FOSS intermediate rendering library (includes Minecraft)
- Valve Says Counter-Strike 2 for macOS Not Happening, There Aren't Enough Players
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The Ultimate Cross-Platform Rendering Engine?
BGFX: Pretty mature and easy to use with many backends.
- Cairo – Open-Source 2D Graphics Layer/API with Fonts and Many Back-Ends
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Best graphics libraries for game development that are compatible with Apple Metal API?
bgfx. I have not used it, but I have heard good things about it.
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LWJGL = SFML vs Allegro vs SDL vs Ogre vs ???
There's kind of a lack of this for C++ in 3D, I think it's often due to the necessity of a secondary scripting language in game engines with C++, which isn't necessarily needed in Java or C#. SFML is like that (but also 2D), Godot is similar (but more geared towards 2D). Ogre3D is an actual engine like I mentioned earlier, not sure how easy it is to use. Cocos2d is higher level, but is also 2D only. I'm not fond of SDL, it feels like a windowing library with slow old school immediate mode stuff attached, so it ends up not being good at the rest of the tacked on things. SDL is popular as a windowing library, and it's why you see it used everywhere (but the most notable uses of it aren't using their drawing capabilities), I often see bgfx thrown around, and for you it might be a good choice, though I have no experience with it.
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Is it a crazy idea to create a 3D operating system?
Another route could be using an abstraction over Vulkan (faster, more efficient, more difficult): bgfx, dawn, magma, or wgpu (Rust).
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The update we all want but will never get
now, java is actually quite a performant language and even if its not most of the performance bugs in mc are due to it being single threaded, inefficient chunk generation and optimizing, and it built ontop of opengl WHICH isn't much of a performance hit but its still ehh idk it doesn't matter that much (NOW SWITCHING THE GAME TO AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT GRAPHICS API WOULD SUCK ASS TO DO (and vulkan is quite verbose :))) (AND also bgfx would probably be better due to it being an abstraction layer ontop of all the graphics apis so minecraft could target many depending on your platform (and also bedrock used to (or still does i dont know) use bgfx before they switched to just two (IF IM READING MC WIKI RIGHT BECAUSE IM NOT ENTIRELY SURE IF THEY USE BGFX STILL ?? SO THEY COULD STILL BE TARGETING MULTIPLE YET THEY JUST WROTE THEIR NEW SHIT BAD IDK))
What are some alternatives?
Vcpkg - C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS
GLFW - A multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, window and input
imgui-node-editor - Node Editor built using Dear ImGui
DiligentEngine - A modern cross-platform low-level graphics library and rendering framework
ZXing - ZXing ("Zebra Crossing") barcode scanning library for Java, Android
magnum - Lightweight and modular C++11 graphics middleware for games and data visualization
freetype-gl - OpenGL text using one vertex buffer, one texture and FreeType
Ogre 3D - scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine (C++, Python, C#, Java)
ImageMagick - 🧙♂️ ImageMagick 7
sokol - minimal cross-platform standalone C headers
Cppcheck - static analysis of C/C++ code
The-Forge - The Forge Cross-Platform Rendering Framework PC Windows, Steamdeck (native), Ray Tracing, macOS / iOS, Android, XBOX, PS4, PS5, Switch, Quest 2