The Mauve Lamp Engine is a data-driven 3D game engine.

When creating a 3D game engine, I took a lot of time to research the best approach. It’s a big task, so good planning is key.

For the engine I decided to make an Entity/Component based system rather than using inheritance as is traditional.

I also created a fairly sophisticated messaging system to enable any parts of the engine to communicate with each other, this has proven to be a very good decision as it has added a lot of flexibility.

All ‘gameplay’ functionality in the demo video is provided using the messaging system.

Engine Features:

• Entity/Component design.
• Use of interfaces to strictly define how parts of the engine work.
• Resource manager that caches all resources after they have been loaded.
• .OBJ Model loading.
• JSON based dynamic scene creation – scenes can be reloaded on the fly with any changes instantly displayed.
• JSON based engine configuration.
• Multiple camera support, which can be bound to objects using the messaging system.
• OpenGL based graphics – uses Shaders and Phong lighting with attenuation.
• Textured meshes.
• Basic bone animation.
• Keyboard and mouse control through the messaging system.
• Assert library with built in null pointer asserts and other debug information, only used in debug mode.
• Text rendering using a texture and custom shader.
• Loading screen that shows exactly what is being loaded.
• Messaging system that allows any object to use a function to listen for messages.
  • Objects can listen to multiple types of messages.
  • Instances of objects are listeners so no static functions are used.
  • Object instances are automatically removed as listeners when they are destroyed.
  • Messages can be sent containing any data type, just a new message type has to be created.
  • Message sending/receiving is all done on the stack.

The scene used is currently just a demo, but a full game is currently being developed using this engine.