#Vu

Vu (Virtual Universe) is a minimalist 3D engine written primarily in Go (Golang). Vu is composed of packages, detailed in GoDoc, and briefly summarized below.

• audio Positions and plays sounds in a 3D environment.
• audio/al OpenAL bindings. Links the audio layer and the sound hardware.
• load Asset loaders including models, textures, audio, shaders, and bitmapped fonts.
• device Links the application to native OS specific window and user events.
• math/lin Vector, matrix, quaternion, and transform linear math library.
• move Repositions bodies based on simulated physics.
• render 3D drawing and graphics interface.
• render/gl Generated OpenGL bindings. Links rendering system to graphics hardware.
• render/gl/gen OpenGL binding generator.

Less essential, but potentially more fun packages are:

• eg Examples that both demonstrate and validate the vu engine.
• ai Behaviour Tree for autonomous units.
• form 2D GUI layout helper.
• grid Grid based random level generators. A-star and flow field pathfinding.
• land Height map and land surface generator.

Ensure you have installed Go > 1.3:

go get -u github.com/gazed/vu

Now you can build and run examples:

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/gazed/vu/eg
go build .
./eg

Build Dependencies

• OS X: Objective C and C compilers (clang) from Xcode command line tools.
• Windows: C compiler (gcc) from mingw64-bit.

Runtime Dependencies

• OpenGL version 3.3 or later.
• OpenAL 64-bit version 2.1.

Building on Windows

• Bampf has been built and tested on Windows using gcc from mingw64-bit. Mingw64 was installed to c:/mingw64.
  • Put OpenAL on the gcc library path by copying openal-soft-1.15.1-bin/Win64/soft_oal.dll to c:/mingw64/x86_64-w64-mingw32/lib/OpenAL32.dll
• 64-bit OpenAL may be difficult to locate for Windows machines. Try http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html/openal-soft-1.15.1-bin.zip.
  • Extract Win64/soft_oal.dll from the zip to c:/Windows/System32/OpenAL32.dll.
• Building with Cygwin has not been attempted. It may have special needs.

The engine and its packages include the essentials by design. In particular:

• There is no 3D editor.
• There is no networking package.
• Physics only handles boxes and spheres.
• The device layer interface provides only the absolute minimum from the underlying windowing system. Only OSX, Windows 7 and 8 are currently supported.
• Rendering supports standard OpenGL 3.3 and later. OpenGL extensions are not used.
• Windows is limited by the availability of OpenGL and OpenAL. Generally OpenGL issues are fixed by downloading manufacturer's graphic card drivers. However older laptops with Intel graphics don't always have OpenGL drivers.