Engine Overview

Summary

Fennec is a cross-platform game engine I've been working on for a really long time. Usually just picking at random parts of it after I finish work for the day. It's based on Monogame and a very very old and, at this point, heavily modified version of Nez. I give both of these projects a lot of love! Check them out!

The engine is entirely written in C# with some offline content processing tools written in Elixir. (Called QuickTools, see the section on them below for more info...)

Some of the features I tried to prioritize when building this engine were:

• Ability to reload/change game code without stopping the entire engine.
• Ability to edit levels in the engine itself.
• Abstracting the gameplay code/modules from the engine modules to facilitate modding.
• Driving most of the game with files: Textures, Animation Data, Entity Defs, Maps, etc.
• Windows, MacOS, Linux and possible console support (Monogame helps take care of those!).
• Utilize the Entity Component System (ECS) pattern for most gameplay elements.

Components

The engine is made up of a few "components" or "modules"...

• FennecEngine
  • The core of the engine.
  • Contains the modified version of Nez.
  • Debug utilities.
  • Level Editor.
  • ImGUINET bindings.
  • Public APIs for scripting modules (see: FennecGame).
  
  
• FennecPipeline
  • Plugin/Module for Monogame's content pipeline system.
  • Processes spite-sheets and animations in the TexturePacker JSON format.
  • Processes output from a custom ToonBoom plugin for animations/recolor information.
  • Processes Tiled JSON map formats.
  • Processes Yarn dialogue files.
  • Produces a content manifest file for quick asset lookups at runtime.
  
  
• FennecAudio
  • Bindings for the FMOD based audio engine.
  
  
• FennecGame
  • DLL Module that contains gameplay components, scripts, and other related logic.
  
  
• FennecCompiler
  • Standalone executable that loads both the FennecEngine and FennecGame module, and compiles "Entity Templates".
  • These are .cs files that produce a complete entity made of components. They're compiled into .fent files.
  • The .fent files can be placed in maps, referenced as a file, so if the template updates, so to the instances in maps.
  
  
• QuickTools
  • Elixir based content generation tools.
  • tconv: a tool to convert different types of sprite sheets into the TexturePacker JSON Format.
  • bit_mappers: takes an input Tiled Tileset Def and a bitmap and convert it into an actual map.
  • ex_mgbc: Monogame content definition file parser and generator. Rule based, so any new content added is automatically added to the pipeline.

Updated: 09/14/2024