Tools

Welcome back to another development update for the nCine, covering what has been accomplished in the first part of this year.

If you follow the project on GitHub you might have noticed a big development slowdown during the summer. I blame it on a combination of excessive heat and fatigue that led to a general lack of motivation and perseverance. ☀️

The last two months of work on the nCine were mostly dedicated to the quality of life improvements for users.

Exciting news for this development update: a new supported platform! 🍾 Emscripten I remember playing with the idea of porting the nCine to Emscripten years ago. After all I had every requirement in place: I used OpenGL ES for Android, GLFW and SDL2 as input backends, OpenAL and Vorbis for audio, libpng for images and already supported a POSIX API.

It has been a month and a half of small but useful updates for the nCine. LibPNG The PNG image loader has been modified to support more color types, by copying some code from the libpng example. It means that any nCine game is now able to properly load PNG images with palette or with gray-alpha channels and to expand or strip bit depths that are different than the standard 8 bits.

After all the work carried out during the last months and culminated in the previous update, I took some time to experiment with some different things. I wanted to leave the rendering side for a bit and take a look at how to optimize other parts of the engine.

During those months two very important features appeared in the nCine. The first one is the integration of Lua for scripting, a language which is very easy to integrate and runs very fast. With Lua the user can quickly prototype ideas or actually write the entire game with just scripts, in a way similar to other engines.

Plenty of work has been done during these few last months as I decided once again to update the engine renderer. This time it went from using OpenGL 2 and OpenGL ES 2 to 3.3 and 3.0 respectively.