Laniakea supercluster

Hello there!

I had eventually desided not to waste another summer of my life and make actually something usefull ( or at least interesting ) and here it is: Lanikia Game Engine. Here I would like to do something like devlog. I’ll write about interesting things that I met, problems that I’ve solved and just document my progress. Now some history on how it’s started.

I carried the idea of this project in my head for quite a long time. I believe I’ve started to want to write my own game engine right after I read few chapters from Game Engine Bible 2 years ago. It blew my mind so hard that I instantly started to dreaming about writing all this stuff myself. Multiplatform support, core libraries from scratch, editor, scripting, threading, sounds, realistic rendering, AI etc etc etc. But like most of my crazy ideas this one remained somewhere in the “someday surely” folder.

After 2 years I’ve gained some experience, worked a lot with Unreal Engine, made a couple of games/graphics projects in university and participated in 2 gamejams. Probably what pushed me the most was my computer graphics semestral work that I was doing this spring. It was graded good but imo it ended up with couple code ideas that I extremly wanted to make properly, but unfortunately they mostly remained in an unfinished/prototype state with a lot of TODO labels due to a tough deadline. This made me think that I can finish it later as separete project and here we are.

Now the project is at the beginning of its journey and here is a list of things that if I do I will be extremely happy:

  1. 3D skeletal animations
  2. Simple scene editor
  3. Realistic rendering (something better than Phong)
  4. Small game that runs using engine
  5. Good scalable OOP design
  6. Multithreading

If everything goes well, then I would like to work on other system of the engine too. It would be very interesting to work with physics, game framework, sounds and so on. But I really don’t want to set a hundreds of goals and then end up with another unfinished Frankenstein. Most likely, I will still insert into it pieces of various systems along the way that just seem interesting to me, but focus will be on this mentioned things.

So I think this is it. I have no idea how this project will end up. Probably I’ll eventually pause my work on it because of the bachelor’s thesis, but I really hope that I’ll somehow finish the initial tasks that I set for myself.

Per aspera ad astra!

p.s. Thanks to Victor Zverovich for the coolest project name idea. It was surprise for me that laniakea repo on github was free to use :)