Forum: General Discussion: Engine dependencies and cross-platform support
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blender 2011/01/16 11:43 |
One of the many things I like about your engine is that it
is cross-platfrom. Are you using SDL for setting up OpenGL and capturing input etc? Can you comment on what other sort of cross-platform library dependencies your engine has? Also, how do you manage to build different OS executeables? Are you using cross-compiling on Windows or Linux or OS X? I have an OpenGL project going also and I'm interested in cross-platform features. |
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jezek2 2011/01/17 16:22 |
Implicit cross-platform support is a strong point of Java in which the engine/game is written. I'm using the LWJGL library for OpenGL access. Thanks to Java there is only one build for all platforms which is really great. The actual executables are just simple wrappers to start the JVM with the right options and were done only once (no need to update them).
SDL is also good, albeit it provides only barebone features (which is not bad actually). You have to manage builds for different platforms yourself though, you can setup cross-compilers to make it easier. |
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blender 2011/01/17 17:27 | Oh, I didn't realize that this was based on Java. The game seems to run quite nicely, but will the VM eventually be a bottleneck in performance? |
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jezek2 2011/01/19 01:43 |
Don't think so, the performance of Java is good. Also there is always option to make some performance critical code in native code, though I've found it's not necessary, eg. computational heavy things like CPU mesh skinning performs on par with the C version. There is also another aspect in strong developer tools and 'simpler' language which makes high-level optimizations (these make the biggest difference) quite easier to do.
However the engine is currently quite unoptimized, for example I've added such basic optimization as frustum culling for dynamic objects only just recently. So there is a lot of room for improvement. |