FirstPerson

An FPS playground for creating game prototypes in C using ECS. The ECS architecture is based on Goodluck. Prior attempt: breakoutc, OpenGLESApp1.

Building

FirstPerson uses vcpkg to manage dependencies. When you first clone it, you'll need to run the bootstrap script once. It's called bootstrap-vcpkg.bat on Windows and bootstrap-vcpkg.sh on macOS and Linux.

Windows

1. (If you haven't already) Install vcpkg anywhere on your disk and cd into it.

   • Run .\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat to build vcpkg.
   • Run .\vcpkg.exe integrate install to inform Visual Studio of the location of vcpkg.

2. Install the dependencies:

    $ .\vcpkg.exe install glew:x64-windows sdl2:x64-windows sdl2-image:x64-windows
   

3. Open the repo in Visual Studio 2019 using the Open a local folder option.

4. Build FirstPerson.exe.

5. Run out\Windows\x64-Debug\FirstPerson.exe or out\Windows\x64-Release\FirstPerson.exe.

macOS & Linux

1. (If you haven't already) Install vcpkg in /opt/vcpkg and cd into it.

   • Run .\bootstrap-vcpkg.sh to build vcpkg.

   • If you choose a different location:

     • Pass -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=[path to vcpkg]/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake to the cmake .. command below.
     • (Visual Studio Code) Set the toolchain path in settings.json.

2. Install the dependencies:

    $ ./vcpkg install sdl2 sdl2-image cgltf          # For macOS
    $ ./vcpkg install sdl2 sdl2-image glew cgltf     # For Linux
   

   • If the dependencies fail to build, you might need to install some extra headers. On Ubuntu:

       $ sudo apt install libgl-dev libxext-dev
     

3. cd into the repo and run cmake as usual:

    $ mkdir build
    $ cd build
    $ cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug        # Or: Release, MinSizeRel, RelWithDebInfo
    $ make
   

4. Run it!

    $ ./build/FirstPerson
   

Implementation Notes

Entity indices start at 1

Entity 0 is a special "null" entity. When used as Transform.parent, it signifies that the transform doesn't have a parent.

children[MAX_CHILDREN]

For simplicity, Transform.children is a static array and MAX_CHILDREN is 2. The value of the parent field and the values of the children array are entity indices rather than pointers to actual Transforms.

Forward declarations and typedefs

Forward declarations are used for most structs when they're used as opaque pointers. This helps avoid creating extra dependencies between header files. For the same reason, I avoided typedefs, except for: entity, signature, component data structs and math data types.

Client and the world (on Android)

struct world stores the component data of the current scene. It persists until the app is killed. struct client is similar to the Game class from Goodluck in TypeScript, and it stores data and references related to the GL context, the viewport and the input. Importantly, client is destroyed every time the app is sent to backgournd, and recreated every time it resumes. All shaders and vertex buffers are recreated too.

Math library

The math library is based on gl-matrix used in Goodluck. The vector and matrix data types are typedef'ed arrays. I might try structs at some point in the future. No effort to use SIMD has been made.

Single-threaded

The code is currently written with a single thread of execution in mind. Specifically, I used a few static variables in some systems to store data between frames. In the future, I'd like to consider introducing storage for system-wide data.

Code style

I've used clang-format to help maintain the consistency in the code base. I've tried something new, too: there's no limit on line width. I'm starting to think that deciding where to put line breaks is an integral part of the process of writing code, and that it shouldn't be automated. It's a hypothesis which I'm currently testing, and I might change my opinion on it in the future.