In our last post, we presented the new event system in Vortex and how it allows scripts to receive and react to input events. This week we want to put this system to the test by showing how an interactive playground could be implemented. Enter Vortex Pong!

To see the playground in action, please check out the video above. In the rest of this post, I’m going to break down how the project was built and how the script running the simulation works.

Visual Layout of the World

We first started by modeling the environment. Visuals are not a requirement for a pong-like game, as long as you have two paddles and a ball, but we also wanted to show how easy it is to have realtime dynamic lights in the scene.

Laying out the world for our pong-like simulation. Vortex Editor allows visually assembling our scene from simpler objects and placing the lights.

Vortex Engine enables visually creating the layout of the world and objects inside it. For representing the ball, we used a simple sphere primitive, whereas the rest of the geometry was assembled from scaled cubes.

The Vortex Editor allows easily resizing the meshes into the appropriate shapes and creating materials that interact with the lights. We also used the editor to place the lights in the scene.

Scripting

No matter how good we might be able to make the world look, it won’t do a lot without adding logic to it.

In Vortex, we use Lua for scripting. The Engine provides a runtime to load and execute scripts in the project and it exposes an API that can be used to run a simulation loop and handle events – This is really all that’s needed for this playground!

The Problem Space

We don’t want to go overboard with our implementation, so we will keep everything simple by having 3 functions and a tiny self-contained vector math library.

The ball will bounce around, updated in our simulation function. We want to support having two players. For this, we will store the state of the keyboard as events arrive, and update the paddle positions also from our simulation loop.

Lua is a pretty great language and in under 200 lines of code we are able to build everything we need for this.

Initialization

Initialization happens once at the beginning of the script execution and it is responsible for setting up the main camera, registering callbacks for handling on_frame and on_event messages and finding and caching entities of interest.

Notice how the first two lines add our script functions to the engine’s on_frame and on_event callback list. This is the key for building an interactive simulation.

Handling Events

Handling events is pretty simple. We will hold a global table that stores which keys are currently pressed down on the keyboard. We do not update any paddle positions here. These updates will be handled in the simulation function.

Simulation Loop

The simulation is the most complicated function in this example. It has several responsibilities, including updating everything that is moving, detecting collisions against the world and the paddles, and resetting the game in case of a player scoring.

In the context of this example, we did not dig in deep into possible optimizations other than avoiding unnecessary table allocations. ALU (CPU time) could be saved by premultiplying radii and sizes by 0.5 as part of the initialization function.

In a real life example we would also want to break up this function into smaller ones with more clearly-defined responsibilities.

One of the first things you will notice is that all the logic is simulated in 2D, despite this being a 3D world. There is no need to run the simulation in 3D, as we are only interested in what’s happening on the plane where the game is being played.

Lines 3-13, 43-47: the way the ball simulation works is by calculating the position where it should be next based on its move vector and the time elapsed since the last update. Instead of updating the ball position immediately, however, we check if the new positions would make us collide against a wall, the floor or the ceiling.

Colliding with the floor and ceiling is trivial: we just mirror the y component of the move vector.

Lines 14-41: Horizontal collisions are move complex, as they require checking if we hit the paddles or not.

Lines 49-50: Assuming no player has scored, we send the updated positions down to the engine via the transform objects we previously cached.

Lines 53-71: Finally, we deal with updating the paddle positions based on what keys are currently pressed. This allows for a very smooth animation experience for the player, much more so than updating the positions directly from the keypress event.

Conclusion

This is really all there is to it. Once everything is set up, we can run the playground from the Editor directly or build it into a Vortex Archive and run it on any Vortex Runtime (any Runtime that has a keyboard attached that is).

If you haven’t seen the video above, I recommend you take a look, as I mention a few concepts that I glanced over in this post.

I hope you guys found this post interesting and, as usual, stay tuned for more!

With the vertical slice complete and the 3D renderer in a good spot, this week I decided to shift focus to the scripting API of the engine.

Scripting is a very desirable feature for any engine. It allows adding (and modifying) logic on the fly, without having to recompile or relink any parts of the program. It makes iteration times super fast, enabling creativity.

In Vortex, we chose Lua for the scripting backend. We added initial support about a year ago. At that time, we decided to build a custom binding from scratch and we succeeded, but the work done was mostly proof of concept. This weekend, the objective was to expand this foundation so scripts could perform more useful tasks, such as inspecting and manipulating the world.

In order to achieve this, a number of changes were needed, both at the scripting level and at the editor level. In particular, we needed:

• A way to wrap and expose entity transforms to Lua scripts.
• A way to mutate these transforms.
• A way for scripts to add themselves to the runloop and run logic every frame.
• A way for the engine and editor to run (and “step”) scripts.
• A way to hot reload scripts and rebooting VM when things went south.

The video above shows all these concepts coming together to allow creating a simple simulation of a ball bouncing inside a 3D box. The ball has green a point light inside that moves around with it. This is mostly to show that this simulation is still running on the engine’s modern deferred renderer ;)

The Scripting Model

Key to the scripting model is the ability to talk to the engine from a loaded script and find objects in the scene. This allows the user to visually create worlds in the Vortex Editor and then find the important entities from scripts.

Scripts can also create their own entities of course, but for this example, we just wanted to pre-build the world visually.

For the bouncy ball example in the video above, we started off by creating the containing box, the ball object, and the lights in the scene. We used the Editor tools to create all materials and define the look of the entities and lighting.

But once we have our visual scene, how do we script it?

The entry point for scripts running in Vortex is the vtx namespace. Scripts hosted by Vortex automatically get access to a global table with entry points to the engine.

Functions in the vtx namespace are serviced directly from C++. This is a powerful abstraction that allows exposing virtually all engine functionality to a script.

This is exactly what we did. Through the vtx namespace, the bouncy_ball.lua script easily finds the ball, the walls, and the light. Once we have these objects we can get their transforms and register a function that will update them every frame.

Running Scripts

Once our script is ready, we can bring it into the scene directly from within the Editor.

Currently, loading any script will execute it. This runs all code at the file scope inside it. It’s important that scripts that want to respond to engine events register their callbacks at this point.

In order to run every frame, we are interested in the on_frame event inside the vtx.callbacks table. This table behaves essentially like a list. Once every frame, the engine will walk this list and call all functions registered there.

Pausing and Testing

Since the runloop is controlled directly by the engine, this gives the Editor enormous control over script execution. In particular, we can use the Editor to pause and even step scripts!

Coupled with the Editor’s REPL Lua console, this gives the user a lot of control. Through the Editor UI, the user can stop the scripts and inspect and change any Lua objects in realtime. No need to recompile the Editor or reload the scene or scripts.

Show me the Code!

Ok, we covered a lot of ground above. To help the concepts settle in, here’s the complete bouncy_ball.lua script used to build the simulation shown above. The main points of interest are the main and on_frame functions.

The main function is responsible for finding all important entities in the scene and initializing the simulation. As mentioned before, it is run as soon as the script is loaded into the engine. Notice how the main function adds the on_frame function to the runloop.

The on_frame function runs every frame. It receives a time scale that can be used to implement a framerate-independent simulation.

It is worth noting that nothing in the on_frame function allocates memory. In particular, position components are passed into and pulled out of the engine in the Lua stack, with no heap allocations. This is important, as Lua has a Garbage-Collected runtime and we want to avoid collection pauses during the simulation.

Conclusion

It’s been a lot of fun exploring hosting a scripting language inside the engine and manually building the binding between it and C++.

I think the ability of defining the visual appearance of the scene from the Editor and then allowing scripts to find entities at runtime was the right decision at this time. It’s a simple model that solves the problem elegantly and can be performant if you cache things you need access often.

I am going to continue working on the binding further and seeing how far it can go. It’s a good break from just working on the renderer all the time ;)

I’m definitely interested in your thoughts! Please share below and, as usual, stay tuned for more!

This week has been a big one in terms of wrangling together several big pillars of the engine to provide wider functionality. The image below shows how we can now dynamically run an external Lua script that modifies the 3D world on the fly:

Vortex loading and running an external script that changes the texture of an entity’s material.

In the image above, I’ve created two boxes. Both of these have different materials and each material references a different texture.

What you can see I’m doing is that I “mistakenly” drag from the Asset Library a character texture and assign it as the second box’s texture. Oh no! How can we fix this? It’s easy: just run an external script that will assign the first box’s texture to the second!

I’ve pasted the code of the script below:

As you can see, the script is pretty straightforward. It finds the boxes, drills all the way down to their materials and then assigns the texture of the first box to the second. The changes are immediately seen in the 3D world.

It’s worth noting that all function calls into the vtx namespace and derived objects are actually jumping into C++. This script is therefore dynamically manipulating engine objects, that’s why we see its effects in the scene view.

The function names are still work in progress, and admittedly, I need to write more scripts to see if these feel comfortable or if they’re too long and therefore hard to remember. My idea is to make the scripting interface as simple to use as possible, so please if you have any suggestions I would love to hear your feedback! Feel free to leave a comment below!

Next week I will continue working on adding more functionality to the scripting API, as well as adding more features to the renderer! Stay tuned for more!

Last week when we left off, we were able to implement a Lua REPL in the Vortex Editor console. This week, I wanted to take things further by allowing Lua scripts to access the engine’s state, create new entities and modify their properties.

Scripting Interface to the Engine. A C++ cube entity is instantiated from Lua code that is evaluated on the fly in the console.

In order to get started, I added a simple single function: vtx_instantiate(). This function is available to Lua, but its actual implementation is provided in native code, in C++. The image above shows how we can use this function to add an entity to the scene from the console.

This simple example allows us to test two important concepts: first, that we can effectively call into C++ from Lua. Second, it shows that we are able to pass in parameters between the two languages. In this case, the single argument expected is a string that specifies which primitive or asset to instantiate.

With this in place, we can now move on to building a more intricate API that enables controlling any aspect of the scene, respond to user input and even implementing an elaborate world simulation.

Best of all, because the Lua VM is embedded into the engine, scripts built against the Vortex API will by definition be portable and run on any platform the engine runs on. This includes, of course, mobile devices.

The idea now is to continue to expand the engine API, developing a rich, easy to use set of functions. API design should prove an interesting exercise. Stay tuned for more!