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Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

azul3d.org

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Re: Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

#21

Post by anon4 »

Pxtl wrote: post #11
Guthur wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never read it like that at all. To me it says be mindful when allocating memory. This is no more effort than having to manually allocate and free memory, but also has the convenience and safety of a GC to fall back on.

If I'm going to have to be mindful of the GC I'd rather just avoid a GC language altogether. An abstraction you have to be obsessively mindful of is worse than no abstraction at all.

Most games allocate everything they'll need upfront on level load, or at least try to. If you do the same here, you'll get the same benefits, but with the additional safety of a GC.

Re: Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

#23

Post by tinco »

The web site looks cool, but it sets off a whole bunch of red flags for me.

First of all it doesn't seem to be a game engine. Instead it's a 3d engine and some other libraries suitable for games packaged together. A game engine drives game logic, that's not what this does.

Second, there's no demos of games at all, if I dive into their github account I find some super trivial 3d scene demo's, no games.

Third, no asset loading libraries. Loading assets is one of the most important things, once you've got your game designed and implemented you are going to need assets, and loading assets is not a trivial thing. I personally abandoned a game we wrote almost entirely from scratch (only the physics engine was third party) just because we came at the point of needing assets, and it was clear that it would be simpler to just port our game to UE4 which has just come out.

Fourth, the go programming language is not very suitable for games at all. One of their main arguments is concurrency being a part of the language, concurrency is one of the least important aspects of making a game. In fact if you're a hobbyist just avoid it altogether, it's just not useful for anything. And even when you need it, setting up a simple message channel is simple in nearly every language out there. They brush off garbage collection, but the truth is Go won't perform any better than proper battle-tested game programming languages like C#, Lua, Java or even Javascript. And if you truly need a performant graphics engine, it's going to be either C++, C or Rust anyway.

Re: Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

#24

Post by flohofwoe »

karka91 wrote: post #20

this caught my eye a few months ago when I decided to learn some opengl/gamedev. Started working with it but abandoned it when I realized that opengl 2 is decade old. Other then that it seemed a rather nice set of tools for my inexperienced eye

OpenGL 2.x as base feature level is still a decent choice if you want to be truly multi-platform (e.g. also cover mobile devices). You can still get modern GL features with OpenGL 2.x selectively by using extensions if present. The only things that newer GL versions offer over extensions is a guaranteed support for certain feature sets (similar to Direct3D versions).

Re: Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

#25

Post by exDM69 »

cwyers wrote: post #10

"No, and it likely never will. Azul3D is for programmers and doesn't provide GUI-editors." So, you write your levels using a text editor? That's not for programmers, that's for people who hate themselves.

> So, you write your levels using a text editor? That's not for programmers, that's for people who hate themselves.

Or you would use an external editor like Blender or 3DS Max and do an importer/exporter script. Writing a GUI level editor is a whole lot of work and there are other things in a 3d graphics/game engine that might be a better investment for time.

Re: Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

#26

Post by atomical »

tinco wrote: post #23

The web site looks cool, but it sets off a whole bunch of red flags for me. First of all it doesn't seem to be a game engine. Instead it's a 3d engine and some other libraries suitable for games packaged together. A game engine drives game logic, that's not what this does. Second, there's no demos of games at all, if I dive into their github account I find some super trivial 3d scene demo's, no games. Third, no asset…

Check out vu. It has some great 3d demos.

Re: Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

#27

Post by albertzeyer »

angersock wrote: post #16
president wrote: post #9

No screenshots of the game at all?

It's a framework, not a game. This is a rabbithole many devs fall into--and I've been there myself.

But there must be examples. I doubt they are just developing a framework without having any example demo apps where they test and use the framework. And hopefully, there is also at least one serious game using this framework, otherwise it's doubt-able whether this framework is useful in practice.

Re: Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

#28

Post by heinrich5991 »

enneff wrote: post #14
Pxtl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm going to have to be mindful of the GC I'd rather just avoid a GC language altogether. An abstraction you have to be obsessively mindful of is worse than no abstraction at all.

Nobody said anything about obsessing. When you write code you need to care about your allocations, whether you have a GC or not. When you write code without a GC you need to be mindful of freeing memory. With a GC you do not. So the GC relieves part of the burden of memory management, and that part is often the hardest part (particularly in concurrent systems).

This is not neccessarily true, e. g. in Rust you have code without GC, but the compiler makes sure that everything is freed.

Re: Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

#29

Post by bhouston »

exDM69 wrote: post #25
cwyers wrote: post #10

"No, and it likely never will. Azul3D is for programmers and doesn't provide GUI-editors." So, you write your levels using a text editor? That's not for programmers, that's for people who hate themselves.

> So, you write your levels using a text editor? That's not for programmers, that's for people who hate themselves. Or you would use an external editor like Blender or 3DS Max and do an importer/exporter script. Writing a GUI level editor is a whole lot of work and there are other things in a 3d graphics/game engine that might be a better investment for time.

This is how things were in the bad old days. But there is a lot of "impedance" mismatch between editors like Blender/3DS Max and game engines that this really isn't done much any more. The only exception is for modeling/animating characters and objects -- the levels themselves are almost always assembled and configured in tool (game engine) now.

Re: Azul3D – A 3D game engine written in Go

#30

Post by [deleted] »

tinco wrote: post #23

The web site looks cool, but it sets off a whole bunch of red flags for me. First of all it doesn't seem to be a game engine. Instead it's a 3d engine and some other libraries suitable for games packaged together. A game engine drives game logic, that's not what this does. Second, there's no demos of games at all, if I dive into their github account I find some super trivial 3d scene demo's, no games. Third, no asset…

[deleted]
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