Voxelius rewrite and maybe a video

I began cleaning up the source tree which apparently just ends with a rewrite, although in my terms a “rewrite” isn’t a particular “make from scratch” and more of a “find a better place to put this or that with occasional code styling changes and using better APIs”, so it’s rather a big refactoring rather than a rewrite

Again?! Why???

Simple: my job. During the development of a wee-little full-scaled CAQ suite, I’ve found out that using something other than GLM for mathematics is suddenly a good idea. Enter Eigen, which is particularly cool because it provides a bunch of features I need by default (for instance, hyperplanes and AABBs of TEMPLATED STORAGE TYPE). Another good reason is that the entire source tree has become a big mess considering all the systems are intermingled with each other. So this rewrite-slash-refactoring is aimed at separating them more and utilizing some techniques employed in the master branch currently.

What’s going to change

Source tree hierarchy

I decided to make the entire engine/core of the game structured similar to how a certain game engine is (obviously I am talking about Godot) with a strict separation into namespaces:

Core library (vcore.lib, subdirectory is core) contains stuff that is used throughout the entire project, perhaps even by command-line or graphical utilities that are to be shipped alongside game executables and content
Assets and other miscellaneous game content is still placed in data and is copied into the game distribution archives verbatim without much fuss
Dependencies are also still placed in the deps subdirectory, however now each library brings its own headers inside its own include directory; more than that, the thirdpartylegalnotices.txt (now thirdparty.txt) file is now automatically generated from all the dependency libraries present in the project
Game sources are still placed inside game (game/client, game/server and game/shared), however internally they are split into more subdirectories, just like in the old times of voxelius historic and voxelius early modern
The good old double-compiled main.cc returns, now not inside launch but inside main subdirectory alongside perhaps a bunch of stuff related to a new way of handling irrecoverable errors
Build scripts reside in the scripts subdirectory. New CMD.EXE batch files are provided for Windows alongside Git bash scripts for convenience.

Architecture

Subsystems are split into different categories: config for configuration variable type implementations, debug for debugging subsystems, io for input-output (including file access, mouse, keyboard and window handling), math for math-related functions, utils for general-purpose functions that might be used somewhere across the project.
Game systems will also be split into categories: world for world-related functionality including voxel registry and et cetera, entity for entity-related subsystems including components and entity factory, gui for on-screen graphics including Game UI and HUD elements

Rendering

Won’t change much, but I would like to keep most shaders compiled-in, but allow for some launch-time customization for post-processing effects if they would even become a thing.

What’s after that?

You probably want to ask me why even do a rewrite at this point since you already had a bunch of public tests? The answer is quite trivial as well. I want to start expanding the community because I can’t invest as much time into development as I did back in 2022; now I have a job and an apartment I have to take care of, so it’s kind of a hassle to also full-time on a hobby game alone.

Where’s the code?

For now it’s private. When the time comes, will make a one huge fat commit that just syncs up the current repository (untodesu/voxelius) with the new source code, but as of now the game is in a working state, can be compiled and played (on the public test server) even though versions are different (protocol versions aren’t)