Chira Engine Documentation

A fully customizable (and heavily work-in-progress) MIT-licensed game engine, written in C++20.

Features

To summarize the major features:

• Native Windows, Linux, and macOS support
• As extensible as possible: register custom logging hooks, resource types and providers, etc.
• Custom preprocessing of GLSL shaders, with macros and #include directives
• Cached resource loading and management
• Data-oriented design, using an ECS framework
• Supports multiple simultaneous windows
• Hassle-free Discord Rich Presence and Steamworks API wrappers
• Inline text localization
• Console commands to run actions on the fly, with the ability to pass arguments
• Variables modifiable from the console, with support for caching between sessions
• Logger built-in with colored text and hooks
• Multipurpose game editor

The goal of the engine is to have as much customization as possible, while still maintaining ease of use.

Supported Platforms

• Windows 7+
• Linux
• macOS 11.0+

Planned:

• Android
• Web (HTML5)

Supported Compilers

Platform	GCC	Clang	MSVC
Windows	✔*	✔*	✔
Linux	✔	✔	-
macOS	❌	✔**	-

(*) Supported with MinGW. Packaging a build of the application will require you to copy a DLL from the MinGW bin directory next to the executable. Check the GitHub Actions script to see the path to the DLL.

(**) Homebrew LLVM/Clang is required. Some C++ features used in this project are not supported by Apple's version of Clang.

Supported Rendering APIs

Platform	OpenGL 4.0	OpenGL 4.1	OpenGL 4.3	D3D11	Software
Windows	✔	✔	✔	Planned	✔*
Linux	✔	✔	✔	-	✔*
macOS	✔	✔	-	-	✔*

(*) SDL software renderer implementation is incomplete and will likely never work perfectly with 3D. It exists to make it easier to port to new platforms.

Bundled Dependencies

• Docs:
  • doxygen-awesome-css
• Engine:
  • cereal v1.3.2
  • Dear ImGui v1.89.5
  • Discord RPC
  • entt v3.11.1
  • {fmt} v9.1.0
  • glad v2.0.4
  • glm v0.9.9
  • ImGuiColorTextEdit
  • ImGui Filebrowser
  • ImGuizmo v1.89
  • LibLoader
  • lua v5.4.6
  • magic_enum v0.8.2
  • nlohmann_json v3.11.2
  • sdl v2.26.5
  • sol2 v3.3.0
  • soloud
  • stb_image v2.27
  • stduuid v1.1

Development (Windows)

• CLion: The project will compile without any prior configuration as long as a compiler is installed, but you will need to install the Windows SDK from the Visual Studio Installer.
• Visual Studio 2022: You will need to install the Windows SDK (any version should work) and the CMake integration component. If you do not have any other compilers, you will need MSVC as well.
• If compiling with WSL without using any IDE integrations, skip to the Linux section.

Development (Linux)

The project will compile without any prior configuration in your IDE of choice (or the terminal), but you will need to install a few things first. On Debian-based distros, run:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install cmake build-essential xorg-dev mesa-common-dev mesa-utils

Installing Ninja is optional but recommended:

sudo apt install ninja

You will also need to install dev versions of sound libraries to support each of these sound backends when compiling. If you are compiling the project for your personal use, you only have to install the one you need:

sudo apt install libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libjack-dev

If you are not using an IDE, the project can be compiled using the following commands:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -- -j$(nproc)
cmake --build build

• Replace "Unix Makefiles" with "Ninja" if you installed Ninja earlier.
• Replace "Debug" with "Release" if you want to compile a release build.

Development (macOS)

You must install LLVM from Homebrew, as the default Apple Clang compilers do not work properly:

brew install llvm

Installing Ninja is optional but recommended:

brew install ninja

If you are not using an IDE, the project can be compiled using the following commands:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -B build -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER="/usr/local/opt/llvm/bin/clang" -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER="/usr/local/opt/llvm/bin/clang++" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -- -j$(sysctl -n hw.logicalcpu)
cmake --build build

• Replace "Unix Makefiles" with "Ninja" if you installed Ninja earlier.
• Replace "Debug" with "Release" if you want to compile a release build.