Compiled here is a list of frequently asked questions about Azul3D. If you have questions not listed here please ask in the Mailing List.
Azul3D is a 3D game engine written entirely from the ground up in the Go programming language. It is suitable for most types of 2D and 3D applications, it can even be used for non-game interactive applications. Unlike other modern game engines like Unity, JMonkey, etc, Azul3D does not attempt to provide anything more than programming packages suitable for game developers. There is no custom IDE, nor level editor.
It is a game engine for programmers, by programmers. It is minimalistic, but also extensable compared to most other engines.
It tries to provide the things that most game developers will use daily -- and it tries to provide them well.
Go is one of the very few languages in existence today that provides concurrency at a language level, additionally, Go is compiled into native binaries and has the potential to reach C/C++ speeds. Only some of the most advanced open source game engines today provide good support for multi-threaded rendering and, because of Go, Azul3D is able to provide that feature with ease and simplicity.
There are many other areas where Go could excel at game development -- Go has syntax familiar to those coming from scripting languages and ideally games written in Go would also be ‘scripted’ in Go. You can also imagine each computer player in a simulated game being controlled by it’s own goroutine -- something that would not be possible with the threading model present in other languages.
Azul3D provides a set of packages for developing games and other interactive 2D or 3D applications in Go, a list of those packages and their documentation can be found here.
Yes! You can download and compile them by following the instructions found on the installation page. Alternatively, view the source on GitHub.
A less known fact about OpenGL is that it is extremely forward compatible. In fact all most everything you can do in OpenGL 3⁄4 is also readily available in OpenGL 2 via standardized extensions. Although Azul3D only speaks to your GPU through the OpenGL 2 API; It uses the most modern OpenGL functions available.
This is actually benificial in many ways, one being that Azul3D can target older hardware that mostly supports OpenGL 3 but doesn’t advertise it. When Azul3D does begin using an OpenGL 3 renderer the change will be completely seamless thanks to our gfx package, meaning you won’t have to change a thing.
We get all the same features, the same performance, and we are able to access a wider range of hardware.
Go is by specification a garbage collected programming language, this means that developers do not need to manually control memory but also means they must be aware of how the garbage collector works in order to receive exceptional performance.
The default implementation of Go, uses a stop-the-world garbage collector. This means application code is paused while memory is being garbage collected. If this happens often, your graphical application could appear to be slow or laggy.
But Go is different from other garbage collected languages because it gives you much more control over garbage collection and memory management in general. In truth garbage collection does not hinder game development as much as people generally think because of the following reasons:
Not right now.
Azul3D is mainly for programmers and doesn’t yet offer any GUI-based tools. With that being said, there may be importers in the future for 3D modelers which will make importing scenes from those 3D modelers (such as Blender) into Azul3D trivial.
One of the key points of making games in Go is the easy syntax. You probably don’t actually need a scripting language at all, just script in Go instead. With that being said, you could probably use some scripting language that can interact with Go to script games, of course.
We appreciate that bugs specific to a single package be reported on that package’s GitHub repository.
For bugs related to this website, etc, please file them in the generic issue tracker.
We appreciate that feature requests specific to a single package be requested on that package’s GitHub issue tracker.
For feature requests not related to any package, or related to this website, etc, please request them by creating an issue for them in the generic issue tracker.
Check out the community page.
Any 2D or 3D graphical application, but mainly games.
Please see the platform support page.