v5.0.6-alpha
Zenderer (rhymes with renderer) grew out of increasing frustration with IronClad, an OpenGL rendering engine I wrote from scratch in order to learn the basics of OpenGL. As it starting growing into a game I dubbed Praecursor, it became more and more unwieldy and totally inflexible in most contexts. Thus grew the need for a simpler, more user-friendly engine that I could use without worrying about low-level details to further pursue development of Praecursor, or to start a new project as I see fit. I know now a ton more than I did when I first started creating IronClad, so I can guarantee that I will not make any of the same mistakes again.
Installing Zenderer is quite trivial. All you need are the header
files found in Zenderer/include, and all of the dependency libraries
you can find in the lib directory of the project root. There is
currently only support for Windows (gasp), due to the fact that I use
Visual Studio and the Microsoft compiler for 95% of my C++ development.
It has been tested using MinGW, compiling successfully, but the dependencies
are not included and it has not been thuroughly tested. I most assuredly can't
guarantee any sort of cross-platform compatibility. But this is obviously a
potential todo for when everything else has been taken care of. The only
definite requirement for building Zenderer is a C++11-compatible compiler.
There are various binary dependencies for this engine. Luckily, they are all cross platform and are relatively easy to build from source. They are as follows:
- GLEW (OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library)
- GLFW (OpenGL FrameWork)
- Freetype 2 (TrueType Font Library)
- OpenAL (Open Audio Library)
- libvorbis (OGG/Vorbis Audio Compression Algorithm)
- Lua 5.2 (Lua Scripting Language)
All engine assets are stored in the data folder of the repository. If you
are using Visual Studio in junction with Zenderer for your project, the
included project file will automatically transfer the contents of the data
folder to the Zenderer folder of your expected output directory.
You can see the various ZENDERER_*_PATH #defines sprinkled throughout the
code to get an idea of where the engine will search for certain resources.
For example, shader files are expected to be in Zenderer/shaders/*.
In Release mode, the project will attempt to generate documentation, but
this will likely fail on your system, which is totally okay. I use this for
myself internally to update the Doxygen docs.
Zenderer comes with a very well-documented API, which you can easily find
in the docs folder in this repository. It was generated using Doxygen,