Vu

Vu (Virtual Universe) is a 3D engine based on Go (Golang) programming language. Vu is composed of packages, detailed in GoDoc, and briefly summarized below. More getting started and background information is available on the Wiki

Vu is a small engine intended for simple games. It currently supports Vulkan on Windows, MacOS, and IOS.

• vu/physics handles spheres and convex hulls.
• vu/render uses Vulkan 1.3 with minimal extensions (eg: ray query).
• vu/device supports a basic window, button presses, mouse clicks, and mouse movement.

Vu started as a learning project for Go and 3D programming. It is currently being used by the author to develop games and other 3D applications.

• audio Positions and plays sounds in a 3D environment.
• device Links the application to native OS specific window and user events.
• eg Examples that both demonstrate and test the vu engine.
• load Asset loaders including models, textures, audio, shaders, and bitmapped fonts.
• math/lin Linear math library for vectors, matricies, and quaternions.
• physics Repositions bodies based on simulated physics.
• render 3D drawing and graphics interface.

• Clone the repo, ie: git clone git@github.com:gazed/vu.git
• Use go build in vu/assets/shaders to build the shader generator. Then run the shaders executable.
• go build in vu\eg and run the examples.

Build Dependencies

• Go version 1.23 or later.
• Vulkan version 1.3 or later, and vulkan validation layer from the SDK at https://www.lunarg.com/vulkan-sdk/ Includes MoltenVK needed for MacOS and IOS.
• OpenAL (https://openal.org) latest 64-bit version OpenAL32.dll+soft_oal.dll from https://openal-soft.org/openal-binaries/
• slangc executable from the VulkanSDK for compiling shaders.

• Pure Freecell is freecell coded entirely in Go using the vu engine.
• Floworlds is a strategic puzzle terraforming game coded entirely in Go using the vu engine.

Vu is built on the generous sharing of code and information by many talented, kind, and lucid developers. Thank you in particular to:

• https://www.youtube.com/@TravisVroman Travis Vroman brilliantly explains how to use Vulkan in a game engine. His video devlog and code base provides an overall context for Vulkan that is difficult to get from the specification. Want a Vulkan C engine? Checkout https://github.com/travisvroman/kohi Apache License.

• https://github.com/bbredesen/go-vk MIT License. Go bindings for Vulkan. This is a huge amount of work due to the size and complexity of the Vulkan spec. The vu/internal/render/vk Vulkan bindings were generated using genvk which is based on the binding API designed by bbredesen.

• https://github.com/felipeek/raw-physics MIT License. Raw-physics provides the ability to collide spheres and convex hulls in less than 4000 lines of code. This was perfect for porting from C into Go vu/physics pretty much line for line.

• https://github.com/lxn/win BSD License. Go bindings for the Windows API that do not require c-go and a C compiler. The parts needed were put directly into vu/internal/device/win along with the original License.

• https://github.com/qmuntal/gltf BSD 2-Clause License. GLTF helps tremendously for importing 3D model data and thanks to qmuntal it was possible to pull a few thousand lines of Go code into vu/internal/load/gltf and get a working importer.