Yet another renderer: Locust

Another one of those projects that every engine/graphics programming enthusiast has probably filled entire hard drives with…

This particular renderer / mini-engine originated from a relatively successful attempt to build a graphics API abstraction. Inspired by the quite well made sokol-gfx, I specifically focused on making the sort of graphics API I would like to use, emphasizing convenience and ease of use. The result was a quite capable wrapper over DX11-style graphics APIs. As a matter of fact, it ended up being more of a DX11 wrapper since that was the only backend I wrote for it, however it would have been feasible to write an OpenGL 4.5 backend for it as well. Using this little API I made for myself, I went to, once again, implement a staple of graphics features, as well as a few systems only tangentially related to graphics:

• Physically based material rendering.
• Image based lighting approximating irradiance and radiance integration via pre-convoluted cube maps.
• Linear lighting pipeline with HDR bloom and final tonemapping stage.
• Flat entities-as-ids object model with dynamic composition, supporting (de-)serialization of scenes to and from disk.
• In-engine scene editing tools featuring an object property editor, 3D-gizmos for scene manipulation, an asset importer dialog with batch import support for meshes and textures.
• Support for importing models from FBX.
• Live C++ hot-reload of editor code via .dll hotswapping.
• Custom renderer for dear imgui using my custom graphics API abstraction and with added support for “refractive transparency”

Eventually, as happens with most of these projects, this one lost direction at some point - I began adding a fully custom type system with runtime support that could have ended up becoming the object model for an embedded scripting / game language, and built a few things on top of it like a fancy node editor, however eventually life and other projects overtook this one. I would like to revisit a few elements of it at some point since I feel like this is actually one of the more coherent collection of features in a single codebase that I’ve produced so far.

Feel free to check it out on github as well.