Calamity Engine devlog 25

The final devlog!!!

windows support

i gave up on windows support. I kept getting either dumb errors while configuring or dumb linker errors or dumb build errors and bla bla bla bla. Windows building does not work.

bugs

i fixed a bunch of stupid engine bugs and made everything pretty much more consistent. theres a lot of them so i cant really list them here but i had some bugs in input and physics and some related to serialization
i kept getting these bugs and i kept having to wait 20 mins for every example to rebuild with emscripten

documentation

the documentation and the website is done! i really recommend you check it out (whoever is reading this)!

calamity.sl4shed.xyz

Calamity Engine devlog 24

Platformer example

This example is probably the closest thing to an actual game in calamity engine Anyways, it showcases the tilemap component, polygon shapes (for collision), animated sprites and rigidbodies. It’s pretty cool. I also got it running on the PSP!

Camera smoothing

Now the camera component has a smoothing variable which uhmm… smooths… the position of the camera! 👍 It’s just a basic lerp function under the surface.

Rigidbody update

Rigidbodies now have an isOnGround() function which detects if the rigidbody is touching anything underneath its normal

Exiting gracefully

The engine used to freeze when you tried to exit it on the PSP, but now I refactored like every shutdown function and turned shutdown into exit (because i had a mix of the two anyways). Now the audio, graphics and physics services gracefully shut down and dont leak memory!

Polygon Shapes

I implemented polygon shapes (I didn’t implement them earlier because I was lazy). You can create one with an std::vector of Vector2‘s. If you try creating an invalid polygon, the game engine blows up. You’re welcome! (it doesn’t really blow up, but box2d does)

attached is a photo of the platformer example running on the PSP

Calamity Engine devlog 23

Windows support

i realised i could just use mingw64 and it would work

Tilemap

I implemented tilemaps! You can set a texture for the tilemap and add tiles which are really just sourceRects. You can customize tilesize and bla bla bla you get it

Examples

I wrote a file API example, top-down control example and camera control example. Now, I’m working on a semi-finished “game” which will be a platformer! I still have some stuff to implement to finish that example, but I’m confident I’ll finish it in time!

Website situation is crazy

I wrote a new github actions runner that compiles all my examples to emscripten and builds the examples website with it. Then i have it deploy that to a cloudflare worker which is deployed to calamity.sl4shed.xyz so you should go check it out! (rn it’s kinda broken due to SPA stuff, I’m trying to fix it )

I attached a picture of the platformer example :)

Calamity Engine devlog 22

Windows support

yep, we’re cooked again because of sdl3_gfx not wanting to build on windows!!! I will have a final showdown with MSVC once I get all the examples done

Physics situation is insane

I implemented the Capsule shape!! that’s kinda it. The rendering is kinda dogwater due to sdl3_gfx but what can i do gang. You’re only supposed to use ShapeSprites for debugging anyways

SDL3_gfx situation is (insert adjective)

I made an AUR package for sdl3_gfx and I made a pull request to psp-packages that hopefully gets merged before any shipwright checks my project . Regardless, the psp package is kinda broken because the way you include it is kinda fried but oh well it’s not like im touching calamity engine any time soon (subtle foreshadowing)

Documentation situation plantation damnation donation

I rewrote the getting started guide which is good, probably. Now there is also a project template which you can find on github. The getting started guide guides the guidee through the guided process of creating a project in a gudied guiding way.

stuff to get done

• class documentation
• examples examples examples
• hosting situation is crazy
• playtesting
• ship
• vs code extension (if i feel like it) (shoutout rupnil)

Calamity Engine devlog 21

Windows support

i think like 4 hours of unlogged time go to me, in a windows virtual machine, fighting MSVC. Did you know that MSVC literally REFUSES to compile your project if you use a C-style cast at any point anywhere in your code? Tell me, even if you, the reader, are not a C++ dev, would you rather write this:

(float)20

or this:

static_cast<float>(20)

well MicroSlop thinks you should be forced to write the latter. This kinda prompted me to go through every source file and accept almost every clang-tidy warning that CLion gave me. this should maybe help the code be easier to maintain giving that i set like almost half the variables to const because they should be lmao. I also set a lot of functions to const.

physics class revamp and shape sprite

one very prominent and curious item on my to-do list was implement circles and any other shape box2d had. Like capsules, rounded boxes, polygons, and rounded polygons. Seems simple enough. Only if I hadn’t hard coded “ShapeSprite” to use POLYGONS instead of SHAPES. anyways, i took like 2 hours to restructure and make the physics class more modular and now i have circles!
Also, did you know that SDL3 does not have any primitive drawing functionality? Fun! So, i have to use an external library called SDL3_gfx which is really and SDL3 port of SDL2_gfx. Did you also know, circles drawn with SDL3_gfx kinda look like doodoo? Granted, you’re only supposed shape sprites for debugging, so honestly, i don’t care how good it looks.
I also would’ve posted this devlog later but i saw it reach 10 hours and i was like “ehh maybe i should devlog” (secretly, in the back of my head, i was waiting for the devlog to reach 10 hours to write a devlog). I now have to implement all those other shapes i mentioned above. Fun!
(realistically, it’s not gonna take as long because i already have most of the foundation set to implement those shapes)

AnimatedSprite

this seems like something that shouldve been implemented MUCH sooner, but it’s only now that im implementing it. I implemented the Animation and Frame class. Animations are a glorified vector where you can also set the frames per second of the animation and the texture you want to use. This allows you to have different texture atlases per animation. Given the limitations of the PSP (max texture size is 512x512), you probably and most likely want this. Oh and also, you can set animations to auto play when the AnimatedSprite is loaded!
You can store multiple animations in one AnimatedSprite and play, pause and stop them. And there is also an AnimatedSprite example!

WAIT WAIT WAIT WAIT

there are like 2 days left of flavortown 😬
i have to juggle school and 5 hours of lockin per day which is a bit easier said than done but whatever. school is temporary, hack club is forever
here is my current to-do list:

• error checking and logging: i seem to have glossed over a lot of sdl functions that can and will error. this is more of a chore than something that will take another 10h to implement
• rewrite docs and make a github template for a new project: honestly, the amount of boilerplate required for a new script or the base main.cpp is getting kinda annoying to copy over. this is exactly why i want to make a template project but also why i kinda wanted to make a vs code extension or something like that. only if i had more time lmao
• write more examples: i still want to make examples of games. I kinda gave up on the idea of remaking angry birds (something something time constraints) but instead i plan to write some basic character controller examples like top-down movement and platformer movement. I also plan to write examples showcasing camera control and the file api.

thank you and goodnight

Calamity Engine devlog 20

we are pretty close to release, however:

1. I’m targeting 100 hours
2. I still have some stuff to fix/implement 😍

labels and ui scaling

labels scale properly now, and along with proper scaling also comes the new screenSpace attribute of sprites, shapeSprites and labels which let you completely ignore any matrix multiplication done and draw directly using screen space coordinates. this is useful for drawing UI related stuff. (i mean, i think i should probably rework this because im not exactly sure how it would handle scaling within screenSpace rendered nodes. however for that i would probably want a canvas layer component. this means more pain and suffering to go through)

audio fix

audio now loops and stops properly, and instead of preloading the entire audio buffer with the entirety of the audio data twice (peak programming, I know), I switched to a buffer based system where it always targets to have 16kb of sound data loaded into the buffer.

cmake rewrite

i rewrote the cmakelists file (it was really messy anyways). it should now allow me to expand it more cleanly in the future for other platforms. i also added an option to use the vendored libraries and compile them all. you would want to do this if you would be compiling the project on windows. However, building anything C++ on anything even closely related to windows is similar to the 7th layer of hell.
I tried mingw64 on a windows vm, i tried visual studio and msvc on a windows vm, i tried a clang toolchain on linux to compile exes for windows and it still didn’t work because of stupid dependency issues related to sdl and sdl_image. i’m probably gonna attempt to fix this but still i hate how compiling shit for windows is so incredibly annoying. At this point I’m considering not even adding windows support/windows building in the first place. You would need WSL to build your game for the PSP anyways 🫩

website updates

the website code is now finished, everything works properly except audio context (which really i dont wanna fix but maybe i will. i see how i feel about it in about 2 days).
you can view the source code of the examples and everything and they also run properly in the browser. I have to figure out how to route everything properly, because i would want the website to be at calamity.sl4shed.xyz and the docs to be at calamity.sl4shed.xyz/docs which would mean hosting the website and the docs separately (which sounds amazing).

in conclusion

the updates aren’t really noteworthy, i just had to get a devlog out because allegedly the cookie monster will eat your hours if you haven’t devlogged for more than 10 hours or something like that

Calamity Engine devlog 19

website

i started developing the primary website of calamity engine using vite & vue & nuxt & nuxt ui and whatever other javascript framework buzzwords exist. i want to say that emscripten might be the best and worst thing on earth but i eventually got it to load (sometimes). Sometimes it fails to load because vue router or hmr or whatever the fuck and you have to refresh the page

every example has a manifest.json and a thumbnail. i have a build script piece together each one in the public folder of the website and once you compile the website you can see every example on the page or something like that. i think thats pretty cool but i still need to fix emscripten not working sometimes.

fixed physics slidey bug

physics slidey bug was because i kept setting the previous position of the rigidbody on every frame. now you have a setPosition() thing on the rigidbody which also talks to the node transform in the physicsUpdate function of the rigidbody/staticbody

also i added impulses to physics

this is very important in developing angry birds. I will make angry birds. In my game engine. This is vital in developing angry birds in Calamity Engine.

node tree example

it showcases the file api and saves and shi and also node tree exports. and also sprites and shapesprites. its pretty cool

what i still need to do

• make more examples (honestly not that hard)
• animated sprites
• file copy and file delete functions
• windows build instructions (i may have to install windows for this :( )
• write more documentation
• better errors i hope
• sdl_gfx and circle shapes for box2d
• i have to make a project template on github
  while it may seem like a lot these are relatively small tasks. im confident i can finish all of these before the deadline (i hope)

here are some screenshots of the website :)

Calamity engine devlog 18

physics

idk why my physics is slidey uhmm… claude didnt fix it, i should probably make like a small recreation of box2d and sdl rendering just to send to people/experiment with since this is what i have been doing with issues i’ve been having with sdl for the PSP but my physics shit relies on my graphics stack as well so it’s really annoying

save states and file api

i made a node tree example where its literally just the physics example but you can save-state the boxes and i think that is a good example for the file and save state api. with this i also fixed some bugs related to cereal and the file api

attached is a video which will self destruct

Calamity engine devlog 17

a lot of new features :)

File API

I added a new file api, inspired by godot (of course, i love godot). it’s still SDL on the backend, so every time you open a file you do have to provide a mode (think of python file modes, like “r”, “a+”, etc..)
The file paths you use are "res://some/random/file.extension" to access files in the game’s base directory and "user://savedata/1738.extension" to access a folder in %AppData% or ~./local/share depending on the operating system (this is handled by SDL, so that means it should work on the PSP aswell). I still have to do some more testing, as i only just implemented this but for now it’s working fine.

Revamped Audio system (which now works properly)

The way audio sources worked before basically meant that you could only have one. in the entire runtime of your program. but i fixed that, and now there’s an Audio service to take care of the output device!
That means you should be able to output to a different device, however SDL maps audio devices by integers, and i have no idea how to list them, so for now the default is the operating system’s default.

Revamped examples

All examples now build to web (properly), and I plan to have an example website such as SDL’s example website. I need to work on more examples for features such as node trees, save data, etc…

However, I’m not done yet.

I still have to work on physics, I haven’t implemented impulses yet and you can’t have circles or capsules or rounded boxes yet (amazing, I know. But i wanted to implement these into PolygonSprite which is now ShapeSprite (it still takes in a polygon) so you can, you know… draw them? and SDL3 apparently has no function for drawing circles, or rounded boxes. For that I need ANOTHER library called SDL3_gfx which seems to be kinda maintained? so i think it would be fine…). And also, you can’t use impulses on bodies yet, which you know, is kinda important.

Also, Windows support is still WIP since I own ZERO machines which run windows :) Generally, it should just build provided you have both CMake and MSVC installed, or if you build it through Msys2. I know… It’s annoying to set all of that up, but don’t blame me! Building C++ apps on Windows is generally annoying.

Animated Sprites are also planned, since i figured texture atlases out. For that reason I also implemented Signals which are genuinely just godot signals (i really like how they work, at this point i might be building godot but more portable lmao)

Regardless, I think i see the light at the end of the tunnel, with ~2 weeks left of flavortown, i hope i can lock in and ship this project :) Also, i didn’t devlog for 12h (oops) since i was mainly fixing bugs, improving existing features. Nothing really noteworthy for me.

Calamity Engine devlog 16

maybe theres gonna be another devlog today but im making this one to share progress

Physics!!!!

I successfully started implementing box2d, after like a few hours of scratching my head i managed to make a small demo of boxes falling on another slanted box. im gonna implement impulses and whatnot, finish writing some documentation and add animated sprites and then i’ll ship this project (keep in mind, im not done with calamity engine, i still have the companion app to make)

Calamity Engine devlog 15

docs

I tried writing good documentation, and I believe it’s good so if you want to you can go to calamity.sl4shed.xyz like right now and try to make your own game using the engine :)

physics

I started integrating box2d into my engine and I have to say that box2d is very fried. just look at the function for creating a box. in what world would i really want to pass in half of the width and half of the height that i actually want the box to have (i presume it’s because, intuitively this means the origin point would be at the center but still what’s the point bro)

after im done with physics

i will implement animated sprites i hope i think and then i will start working on the project compiler

ok bye

Calamity Engine devlog 14

ok i got robbed of some time because hackatime was down but oh well idrc. i added ttf support and i made kindof a backbone for the ui library.

labels

its kinda like the godot label, you have a lot of settings you can mess around with, the fonts also have a lot of options so go ham i guess. i attached a simple example of rendering some text. I also added a default font which is Trispace.

right now, todo list in order of what i want to do

• write documentation
• box2d/liquidfun integration
• misc fixes
• maybe work on the ui library?
• unit tests maybe? i want a simple way to test that everything works for every platform
• project compiler
• companion app

Calamity Engine devlog 13

input edition

input

so i basically copied whatever godot did with their input registry so now my input system is good too and its basically the same shit so i dont really need to explain it

although for now its really annoying to set events because its just a bunch of boilerplate. this will hopefully be fixed with the project templater/compiler thing im gonna cook up once im done with the framework itself :)

what im doing now

i want to add ttf support and make a ui library that has like mouse support and keyboard and tab and controller and whatever the fuck else just like in godot because godot is good i love godot

also what i also need to do

• physics (box2d)
• animated sprites
• write more docs
• tilesets (maybe)
• 2d positional audio if i feel like it
• project compiler
• companion app (big one)

Calamity engine devlog 12

the input system is actually good now; i basically copied godot’s homework and made it a lil different but i did it because godot input system is really good. i like how the api works now

Calamity Engine devlog 11

basic input

I have basic input working!! The input is gonna work a lot like in godot because i love godot input. take a look at the attached video for an example of the API. there is still a lot to do (like gamepads, mouse, mouse position, modifiers, input registry, etc) but im confident i can get it out in time

basic audio

i also have basic audio working with sdl audio streams. this means no sdl mixer! yay!!! (and also because sdl3 mixer isnt on the psp yet) (and also because i fucking hate sdl3 mixer)

also more documentation

im gonna setup the docs site to be on https://calamity.sl4shed.xyz soon i hope

ok bye

Calamity Engine devlog 10 (yay!!)

serializing finished

while it was incredibly complicated for me to implement, for the end user it will be literally just the code i attached in the img

documentation update

while im too lazy to write documentation i also write documentation at the same time. its paradoxical. im gonna put up a website soon enough

right now

busy. school. i wanna finish before march ends and ft ends also. im gonna make input and audio and physics (if i have time) then ship this as it is in the framework state.

Calamity Engine devlog 9

yay

serializing/node trees/prefabs

FINALLY, after like a month (well more like a week or so of work), someone answered my stackoverflow question and i finally got serializing and deserializing node trees working with cereal. Now, cereal is something i didnt abstract since honestly its good enough and i dont think i will ever swap it out (i hope im not jinxing myself here)

also

i don’t remember anything else i added but honestly for me this is huge. im also working on some documentation with doxygen and some doxygen theme to make it look like it wasnt made in 1998.

here is a random video of loading node trees working

(keep in mind this is like the cereal way of loading it. i will 100% have an abstract function to do this in a bit)

I’m sorry for like zero devlogging in a while but I’ve become so desperate with random serialization bullshit related to cereal i haven’t been able to make any meaningful progress except some docs. so i guess in the next week stay tuned for some devlog hopefully if someone answers my stackoverflow post (i know very desperate of me)

Calamity Engine devlog 8

extra fun edition

preface

you may have noticed that there hasn’t been a devlog for 4 days, and there are 2 reasons for that:

1. I have been really busy with school
2. psp glibc

logger library

my logger class is literally just a wrapper around spdlog which is a very neat logging library, i made it a wrapper to have a nice API exposed to the user and for future-proofing.

however

spdlog came with some… considerations, and i decided ultimately it would be nicer to package up fmt & spdlog for the PSP and push them to the psp-packages repository
I had to scratch my head a little while patching the source code but in the end it worked out and I have logging working on the psp too!

also

honestly I don’t remember anything else I added so here’s an image of logging working on PPSSPP.

ok bye

Calamity Engine devlog 7

major changes!! big win

rotation fix

ok so remember last post where i was talking about how painful it is to use matrices? well i was kinda right but also i was kinda stupid. i’m wiser now. aka my smarter friend helped me fix it and now rotation works properly.

with big rotation comes big consequences

positive consequences that is, i added a camera component!
you can add this camera component to any node, pretend it has the height and width of the screen (technically, nodes cannot have a pixel width and height unless they have a sprite. Scale is a multiplier as a consequence to adding matrices, however as in most game engines the camera’s pixel width and height is the size of the screen!). The camera also has an origin point that is set to 0.5 by default as in most game engines, so have fun i guess?

with major changes come major changes

so the game engine is now SDL3 (yes it still compiles to the PSP)! sdl3 is a lot better and it wasnt really that hard to port it because i barely used SDL in the first place, it was only used in graphics.cpp.

one more thing

the engine builds to the web now with emscripten! very exciting as this means my usability rating will not be 2 stars…

attached is video evidence that i’m not lying

it uses the calamity mod sprite from terraria because my friend thought it would be funny, anyways in the video the camera is spinning and zooming out at the same time. I don’t really have a “game” yet since no input/audio/file library but that is to come.
Next on the list is probably logging and error handling since i desperately need that (the engine segmentation faults if it tries to load a texture that doesnt exist when built natively lol)

ok bye

Calamity Engine devlog 6

pain edition

So… I thought if i made a 2D game engine I wouldn’t have to deal with matrices (transformation matrices), but here we are!!!
remember that bug from like the second devlog? where the node was spinning around wrong? well, turns out to fix it you have to have matrices in the transform because yeah i guess you just do.
If by some weird coincidence you’re going through the same headache as me here is a good resource: matrices and transformations (godot)

other changes

nothing really, I wanted to start work on the camera but that requires (you guessed it) transformation matrices!!!

so not a lot for now, expect this bug to be fixed maybe tommorow if i feel like it or this weekend

ok bye

Calamity Engine Devlog 5

fun scripting edition

Technically attaching scripts to nodes isnt part of the framework, however, it is part of the project compiler (more on that later), so, I drafted up how the scripting system would look like!

how does it actually work

You have a folder called “scripts” where you have .hpp files that look like the image attached. Basically just like unity’s scripting API, so it should be pretty simple to get used to! These “scripts” are just classes that extend the Script component which contains all of the base functions like update, start, etc…. Then, you just attach the script like a regular component and it just works!
This way, once you’ve set up the node tree and attached scripts you basically never have to touch main.cpp ever.

node trees

Basically a fancy way of saying “serialize and deserialize loaded nodes along with their corresponding components”. Exporting a node tree would just take every node under the root node and serialize it into a JSON file.

file access

I’m currently working on a file access API used for loading and writing node trees when needed, that is, of course, cross platform (not sure about wasm yet though).

project compiler (the middleman)

I’ve finally decided how this would be structured. I will have a project structure format (fancy name for json serialized node tree + script collection) that you pass into a standalone project compiler program to turn it into a compilable calamity framework C++ project.

what about the companion app?

The companion app (aka the engine itself) would be an editor made for the project structure format. This way, this one big project is split up into more handleable chunks that I can work on individually. I still have to create the standard project template: something that would compile to all platforms with no extra tinkering required (by tinkering i mean cmake stuff)

ok bye

Calamity Engine Devlog 4

The app compiles cross-platform! 🔥🔥🔥 Turns out it seg faults when it tries to load a texture file that doesn’t exist.

how about really cross platform?

I know nobody really bothers to install standalone apps when they vote for projects, so i will be attempting to make calamity engine compile with emscripten (which will be a big pain in the bum bum)

plans for companion app

I will probably have to build the companion app with calamity engine so it will kinda be engine-ception, “playing” the game will just mean loading the scene node tree (i still have to figure out how to tie scripts to specific nodes 😬, the solution im thinking of right now is “if current scene is this, run this if this node exists” and i hope there’s a better way to do it perhaps)

for now

Here it is running horribly on my phone through termux x11 (1 frame per sometimes)

ok bye

Calamity engine devlog 3

im figuring shit out

Ordering will be done in the way that godot does it, aka, root node -> render -> renders children in order

scenes/prefabs

I will implement a serializer & deserializer (optimally in JSON) to load node trees instantly, this would be used for scenes and prefabs

saves

This would be a bit harder to achieve cross platform (did i mention i want the engine to be cross platform?), still i think json would be a good option.

cross platform

I want to stray away from inbuilt kernel functions for the PSP as much as possible, since technically the engine can be compiled to PC since it only uses SDL2, however:

ok bye

Calamity Engine Devlog 2

im tweaking bro

i have implemented a child-parent system where you can have a node be a child of another node and etc etc i think if you’re reading this you’ve used a game engine before.

Anyways my last devlog didn’t go into detail at all, so i’m going into detail in this one:

structure of the engine

I want this game engine to be kind of like unity: The engine has a component system (for example, you can have a node and have a sprite component to render a sprite, or maybe you want a camera component or an audiolistener component, etc…)

end goal

right now im working on the basic framework (i still have audio and input and physics to implement) but after I’m done with that i want to have a desktop app that lets you generate a project with a level/scene designer and an individual node script system (that will be a pain to setup, but oh well, if it’s auto generated it shouldn’t be that hard). I guess there will be a certain layer of abstraction inbetween what you have in-editor and what the final compiled version is like, so perhaps errors will be hard to figure out among other output, but that’s a problem for future me!

right now

have a video of realistic flappy bird 3d spinning along incorrectly with another flappy bird 3d

Calamity Engine Devlog 1

This is a project I’ve been wanting to make for a while, ever since I’ve purchased my PSP.
Basically, Calamity Engine is a 2D PSP game engine.
Here is the result of 2-ish hours of work 🔥🔥🔥: