Introduction

What is it?

Crown is a general purpose and data-driven game engine, written in orthodox C++ with a minimalistic and data-oriented design philosophy in mind.

Crown isn’t tied to a particular game type or genre but instead it offers a set of generic primitives and facilities to help you create a wide gamut of interactive 2D and 3D products.

Crown also offers a complete cross-platform editor to create and put together all the elements that make up your game.

Crown is loosely inspired by the Bitsquid engine and many of its design principles.

Features

Note

Crown is in active development and new features are added and improved all the time; you can check out the development efforts in real-time on GitHub and on the Discord channel!

  • Data-driven
    Every aspect of the game is controlled through text configuration files. Text files are human-readable for easy inspection and play nicely with traditional version control systems. Before shipping, configuration files are compiled to efficient platform-specific binary blobs.
  • Data-oriented
    Data in memory is organized to achieve the maximum performance possible on every platform.
  • Lightweight codebase and runtime
    Engine plus tools amounts to less than 50K LOC. Written in simple ‘C-style’ C++. It is easy for anyone to understand and make modifications.
  • Editor
    • Runs and looks equally well both on Linux and on Windows.
    • Source data importers (meshes, sprites, sounds, textures etc.).
    • All the editing data is held by the editor which runs in its own process, if the Runtime crashes you can restart it without losing your work.
    • TCP/IP communication with Runtime allows editing to be mirrored to remote devices (phones, consoles etc.).
    • Hot-reloading of every asset including code.
  • Graphics
    • High-level 2D and 3D objects: sprites, meshes and lights (directional, omni and spot).
    • Cross-plaform GLSL-like shader programming language with data-driven definitions of render states and permutations.
    • D3D11, GL 3.2 and GLES 2.0 render backends.
    • PNG, TGA, DDS, KTX and PVR texture formats.
  • Animation
    • Animation state machine with events, variables and blending with simple expressions evaluator.
    • Flipbook sprite animation.
  • Physics
    • Static, dynamic and keyframed rigid bodies, triggers and joints (fixed, spring and hinge).
    • Spatial queries: ray-, sphere- and box-casts.
    • Multiple collision geometries per rigid body.
    • Collision geometry can be generated from mesh data, authored by artists or manually specified.
    • Uniform scaling of physics objects.
  • Audio
    • 3D audio sources with position and range-based attenuation.
    • Volume control.
    • WAV format supported.
  • Scripting
    • Integrated Lua runtime can be used to control every aspect of the game.
    • LuaJIT is used on supported platforms for maximum performance.
    • Integrated REPL to quickly test and experiment while the game is running.
    • Live reloading of gameplay code without needing to restart the game.
  • Debugging
    • Integrated profiler.
    • Callstack generation for C++ and Lua.
  • Gui
    • Immediate-mode GUI with custom materials.
    • TrueType text rendering via texture atlas.
  • Input
    • Unified interface for accessing mice, keyboards, touchpads and joypads.
  • Exporters
    • Mesh exporter for Blender >= 2.80.

Supported platforms

  • Runtime
    • Android 7.0+ (ARMv7-a, ARMv8-a)
    • HTML5 (Wasm/Emscripten)
    • Ubuntu 20.04+ (x86_64)
    • Windows 7+ (x86_64)
  • Editor
    • Any 64-bit Linux with GTK+ 3.22 or newer (Ubuntu >= 20.04+)
    • Any 64-bit Windows 7+
    • 64-bit dual-core CPU or higher
    • OpenGL 3.2+ graphics card with 512 MB of RAM, 1 GB recommended
    • 4 GB of RAM minimum, 8 GB recommended
    • 1366x768 display resolution minimum, 1920x1080 recommended
    • Three-button mouse

Contributors

In chronological order.

  • Daniele Bartolini (@dbartolini)
  • Simone Boscaratto (@Xed89)
  • Michele Rossi (@mikymod)
  • Michela Iacchelli - Crown logo v1.
  • Raphael de Vasconcelos Nascimento (@vasconssa)
  • Giulia Gazzoli - Crown logo v2.