Dent

Dent is a work-in-progress 3D game engine. The idea is to get most of the boring stuff out of the way so that you can develop your game quickly, but still allow access to lower level objects, so that if you need to do any finicky graphics thing you can.

Dent is developed on Ubuntu, but has been known to work on Windows.

Should I Use Dent?

If you want to hack together a game in Python, don't want to fiddle around with OpenGL much and are not too concerned about high levels of polish, I'd say "yes".

Dent offers smoothing over some of the bumps of getting up and running with OpenGL and python game development. Some of the features offered are:

• Shaders:
  • Loading and compiling GLSL from disk
  • #include one file inside another
  • Smart uniform loading
  • Vertex attribute handling
  • Transform feedback shaders
  • Tesselation shaders
  • Deferred rendering Phong-Blinn shaders builtin
• Texture abstraction with loading/saving from image files
• Asset manager
• 3D asset objects to populate your scenes
• Built in game replay mechanism
• Configuration files (for levels of graphics etc) handling
• Render pipelines to do advanced lighting/differed shading

However.

Dent is in no way complete. It is very much a work in progress, with bits being added here and there. At the moment, because it has very little use, there are quite a few areas that need some improvement. I'd be very happy to have some pull requests.

How Do I Get Dent?

$ git clone https://github.com/rspencer01/dent.git
$ cd dent
$ pip install .

Minimal Directory Layout

For a pretty minimal game, check out pong. In overview, a typical game would have the following directory structure:

├── my-awesome-game.py
├── scenes
│   ├── __init__.py
│   └── MainScene.py
└── shaders
    ├── image
    │   ├── fragment.shd
    │   └── vertex.shd
    └── ...

The file my-awesome-game.py is the entry point to the game (you would run the game as python my-awesome-game.py). It is moderately minimal, and could simply look like this

#!/usr/bin/env python

import dent.core

The file scenes/__init__.py is similarly minimal:

from MainScene import MainScene

__scenes__ = set([MainScene])
__starting_scene__ = MainScene

The items in shaders/ are the GLSL shaders you will use to render your game. Dent provides some builtin shaders, but take a look at the pong project above for a very simple one.

All of the logic will reside in MainScene.py. For example:

import dent.Scene as Scene
import dent.RectangleObjects as RectangleObjects
from dent.RenderStage import RenderStage
import dent.messaging as messaging

class MainScene(Scene.Scene):
  def __init__(self):
    super(MainScene, self).__init__()

    import dent.Texture
    dent.Texture.getWhiteTexture().load()

    self.ball = RectangleObjects.BlankImageObject()
    self.ball.width = self.ball.height = 0.01

    messaging.add_handler('timer', self.timer)
    messaging.add_handler('keyboard', self.key_down)
    messaging.add_handler('keyboard_up', self.key_up)

  def display(self, **kwargs):
    self.ball.display()

  def key_down(self, key):
    # Do key down things

  def key_up(self, key):
    # Do key up things

  def timer(self, fps):
  	# Do timer things

Where Are The Docs?

https://dent.readthedocs.io