Vortex Engine v2 [2017]

Vortex2 is an open-source, lightweight 3D graphics rendering library which is easy to use and easy to integrate with any application that requires graphics. It can also be used as the base for a higher level graphics or game engine.

It has been released under the terms of the MIT license, which allows its use within both open and closed source software. This license allows to use the library in commercial applications.

Development started soon after finishing Vortex v1, but was temporarily abandoned due to the Monkey-X language (on which it was based) coming to a halt. A fork of Monkey-X named Cerberus-X appeared and that gave me motivation to finish this vastly improved version of the library.

The Github repository for this version of Vortex can be found here: https://github.com/JaviCervera/vortex-cx/tree/release/2.0

Features

• A clean, simple object oriented API programmed in the Cerberus-X language.
• Works on all Cerberus-X targets that support OpenGL ES 2: Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and HTML5.
• Graphics architecture based on modern OpenGL ES 2.0. It makes use of shaders and vertex buffer objects.
• Supports 2D (primitives, images, text) and 3D rendering.
• Loads textures in the most common formats: JPG, PNG, BMP...
• Includes tool to convert TrueType (ttf) fonts into bitmap based fonts.
• Meshes can be created in code or loaded from a custom format (includes tool which uses the Irrlicht engine to import meshes, with support for several popular formats).
• Materials support diffuse color, diffuse texture, lightmap, normal map, cube map, opacity, specular reflections and shadows. They also support different blending modes: solid, alpha, additive, multiplicative.
• Dynamic lighting with directional and point lights (configurable number of lights).
• Realtime shadows from a single directional light source.
• Vertex based animation for meshes (vertex animations are automatically generated from skeletal animations).
• Linear fog for ambient effects.
• Collision detection with cubes and spheres, triangle collision detection with raycasting.
• Camera picking of entities.

Acknowledgments

• The Irrlicht team for the engine used on the mesh tool (Irrlicht is licensed under the Zlib license).
• Sean T. Barret for his stb_image_write and stb_truetype libraries, used on the tools (these libraries are public domain).