About FPEngine
We are currently working on a custom 3D game engine called the Flying-Potato Engine (FPEngine). It focuses on bringing a native game development experience in C++ without the hassle of having to spend precious time on common core components or setting up graphics frameworks. The goal is a compact code-first approach focused on rapid game development and being able to play, test and design simultaneously using both built-in and custom types. All components, including the world editor, are designed to automatically work with your game specific types by injecting them on initialization. Asset file handling is automated as much as possible so you don’t have to spend any time worrying about file management or deployment of your game. Optimization of your assets is mostly done automatically too, there are very few steps to adding an asset because the most efficient setup is detected and generated by the engine.
So to sum things up, you can create a new game project with just a few clicks. And by writing a few lines of code you can build custom objects, scripts or work with the underlying graphics API. You can inject game specific types into the engine and world editor, and design your worlds while you are playing the game. A final deployment of your game is done using a single build mode switch and automated asset file packing into a game folder.
Everything required to start developing a game is ready to be used, and the open design of the engine and access to underlying components enables extensive customizability and extensibility. FPEngine is currently being built from scratch for the Windows platform using DirectX 9. Support for other platforms and different graphics frameworks such as DirectX 11 will be considered at a later time. Right now we are focusing on building up the engine from scratch to a usable state.
If you wish to get more information about FPEngine, have any suggestions or want to collaborate with us on this project please don’t hesitate to send us a message through the contact page. You can also check out my blog posts about FPEngine.
Showcase
The following images show a visual timeline from the current state of the engine back to the first day of development. The engine has more features than the ones shown below, but many of them are hard to show visually as they are more technical than visual. These screenshots should give a general overview of the visual graphics progress though.
Please note that the models and textures used are purely for testing purposes.
Testing of the internal world editor.
Improved rendering core and playing with more shaders.
A clean overview of the testing scene.
Performance test resulting in 5.3 million visible polygons running at 60+ frames per second.
New culling system seen from a secondary camera.
Performance test with more than 1.3 million polygons running at a solid 60+ frames per second.
Working on shaders.
Adding support for model files.
First test of the terrain system.
First day, setting up the project.
