The Colloseum

A small C codebase / game engine combo, made from scratch with 0* external dependencies, made for game or app developers who love making things from the bottom up and learning low level programming.

📔 Table of Contents

• About the Project
  • Description
  • Tech Stack
  • Features
• How to Use
  • Building
  • Code Docs
• Roadmap
• License
• Credits

🌟 About The Project

Description

The primary motivation behind this project was to get a better grasp of
graphics programming, game engine architecture, and the C language as a whole, and also make a complete, easy to use, albeit highly opinionated framework / engine* for anyone to make their games or apps with.

This project was designed trying to follow Handmade Hero's, or the Hidden Grove's philosophy of building something from nothing, with minimal libraries and tools.

Tech Stack

The plan is to support any rendering framework and any operating systems, however, for now, rendering features are implemented mostly for Windows and OpenGL.

While I want to keep library usage to a minimimum, there are some thing I just won't code myself. This includes:

• GLFW
• Glad
• tomlc99

Features

• Base Layer
  • Context Handling
    Getting information about the current OS, compiler and processor architecture.
  • Logging
    Basic logging functionality, provided through macros for now.
  • Memory Management
    Mememory management via static arenas.
  • Data Types
    • Renamed Primitives
    • Strings
    • Hashmaps
  • Math
    • 2D 3D 4D Vectors
    • 3x3 4x4 Matrices
    • Quaternions
• OS Layer
  • File IO
    'CRUD' operations with files, directories and general content.
  • Path Utilities
    (windows 💀)
  • Time Utilities
• Render Layer
  • Camera
    • Perspective Camera
    • Ortographic Camera
  • ... more rendering things, mostly specific to OpenGL for now.
• Input Layer
  • Check out the input layer readme.
• Draw Layer
  • TOOD(calco): Start draw layer abstractions.

❔ How to Use

In all honesty, if your goal is learning more about low level programming, I would recommend making your own codebase, and maybe use this as inspiration / help whenever you need it.

Building

Addendum: A rudimentary build.sh was added, following the exact steps described in this document. You can just run and use that for now.

Prerequisites

This project uses CMake as a build tool, with Visual STudio 2022 generators on Windows. Other generators should work, but if not, feel free to open an issue 👍 .

DISCLAIMER

For those on Windows, due to troubles of getting vcvarsall on windows added to path automatically, you have to manually add the path to your C libraries in CMakeLists.txt.

Example path: C:/Program\ Files\ (x86)/Windows\ Kits/10/Lib/10.0.19041.0/um/x64/

Actually Building

Inside the root folder create a build directory, then, from within the newly created directory run:

cmake ..        # Specify any other settings you want
cmake --build . # Specify any other settings you want

WARNING

For now, this does not copy the assets folder to the generated executables location.

Code Docs

Will be auto-generated via Doxygen in a later version, but considering the project is still under heavy development and hasn't even reached version 0.1, documentation is non existent.

🧭 Roadmap

The roadmap can be seen here, on Trello!

⚠️ License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

💎 Credits

As I have already mentioned, the main inspirations behind this project are:

• Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero
• Ryan Fleury's Hidden Grove

Alongside them, other great codebases which were used as inspiration and help include:

• Pixel Rifts' C Codebase
• Mr. 4th Programming's Youtube Videos
• Randy's Resources Page
• All of Ryan Fleury's blog posts, can't link them all but they are highly valuable.

All libraries linked in tech stack!