Tundra

Tundra is the runtime part of a general-purpose 3D game engine for the first generation of PlayStation consoles (PlayStation 1 / PSX), along with a few CLI tools to ease development and use of the engine. It uses C++20 and psn00bsdk as its underlying SDK, but currently it only supports Windows.

The engine was created as part of my Master's thesis, and as such, the engine is limited in features, has multiple hacky solutions and there are many things I would do differently. This repository is not under further development, as I'm planning on rebooting the project. The new repository will be linked to here.

While it was and can be used for developing a game with, doing so you will likely run into unknown bugs, weird behavior or missing features that I cannot promise to fix or help out with. So use it at your own discretion.

One small game made with the engine is Color Cannon Coop made at Nordic Game Jam 2024.

Thesis

This engine was created as the core part of my Master's thesis in MSc in Games (technology track) at IT University of Copenhagen in fall of 2024.

In practice, I primarily desired to spend my time on developing an engine. Formally, however, the thesis was motivated by there not being any general-purpose game engines for the original PlayStation out there (to my knowledge). It seems this is in part because of the technical limitations of the console, but I'm not entirely convinced that is reason enough for one to not to exist, and so I sought to answer the following hypothesis:

What are the technical capabilities of a general-purpose 3D game-engine for the original PlaySta- tion?

The final report can be found in the root of the repository (thesis.pdf).

Acknowledgements

The development of this work has relied on the aid of various people:

PSX.Dev Discord server for answering questions (in particular Nicolas Noble, spicyjpeg, stenzek and Melchior)
The PSX community in general for keeping this console alive and developing projects, tools and sharing knowledge which has been very essential for this project
Mike 'gwald' Garcia and Martin 'nocash' Korth for feedback on the project over at psxdev.net
Jesper, Freddy and Noah for helping me testing out the engine at Nordic Game Jam 2024

and various projects:

psn00bsdk (by Lameguy64, Spicyjpeg and more)
PCSX Redux (including PSyqo) (by Nicolas Noble and more)
NOTPSXSerial (by JonathanDotCel, Sktichin and more)
Unirom (by Nicolas Noble, JonathanDotCel, ABelliquex and more)
PlayStation Specifications (originally by Martin 'nocash' Korth, edited and hosted by Nicolas Noble, spicyjpeg, kraptor and more)
DuckStation (by stenzek)

If you feel you have contributed, and I have left you out, I deeply apologize and will rectify it if you reach out to me.

Features

Game object system using entities and components
Renderer supporting textured/untextured and smooth/flat shaded 3D models, 2D sprites, 2D debug text (psn00bsdk's debug text), cameras, layers and directional lighting.
3D transform system accelerated by GTE
Asset compiler from raw assets (.obj, .png, .wav etc.) to native engine formats, including simple loading of those assets in in engine
Input system for original controller (not analog)
Sound system to play 23 looping and one-off sounds simultaneously plus 1 music track
Hardware accelerated matrices and vector classes
Fixed-point type including fixed point math
Time/clock system
Various other utility (strings, list, debug asserts, to-string functionality)
Automated test system (mostly for engine development)

Missing features and limitations

No physics system
No animations
No concept of a "scenes"
The entire game is packed into a single binary that is fully loaded at startup, which means
- The entire game (including assets) is limited to 2 megabytes
- All assets have to be loaded into RAM, even those that are just loaded into video and sound RAM.
- There is no audio streaming, significantly limiting the size potential of music
No advanced audio support (no stereo, no spatial sounds, no procedural sound effects)
The renderer is not particularly optimized, and only utilizes trivial culling mechanisms.
No C++ standard template library (STL), and only limited custom substitutes
No support for other controllers than original (only digital mode)

How to use

Game setup

The engine utilizes Visual Studio Code (or a fork, such as VSCodium) and the emulator PCSX Redux for its workflows, and a game project is setup using the Tundra game template.

Setup tools

VS Code

Install Visual Studio code
Install Native Debug extension
Install clangd extension
Optional: Install CMake extension (for syntax highlighting in CMake files used for project configurations)

PCSX Redux

Download PCSX Redux (topmost) - it does not matter to the engine where you put it
Open the emulator
Press escape to show the top bar and open Configuration > Emulation
Toggle Enable Debugger on
Toggle Enable GDB Server on
Toggle Dynarec CPU off

Setup game project

Download the Tundra game template (download as Zip and extract it or fork it the repository)
Rename the folder to your game project (no spaces)
- This just changes the name of your ISO files (and the name of your game project folder for your own convenience).

The project template contains simple white cube assets, which it renders and rotates.

Project structure

assets/ is where you put your raw asset files (.png, .obj, .wav)
- Currently, contains the simple white cube model
- How you structure this is up to you
src/ is where you put your source code
- Currently it sets up a camera, loads the cube model asset, constructs an entity with a Model component with the cube model, rotates it continuously and displays a Hello. world! text.
sources.cmake is a list of all source files (.cpp) that must be included in the game
assets.cmake is a list of all asset files and their configurations (see the Assets section)
tools/ contains the build scripts
external/ contains the built engine

Building the game

The game is built from a command-line interface (CLI) using batch scripts

Open you terminal (e.g. Command Prompt)
Navigate to your game project folder
Run tools\build\generate.bat
- This is only needed if you have never built before or added a new source file to sources.cmake or a new asset to assets.cmake
Run tools\build\build.bat <config> where <config> is either debug or release (release has full code optimization and removes all assertions).

Running and debugging the game in emulator

You run the game in the emulator through Visual Studio Code:

Build your game (see [Building the game](#Building the game))
Open PCSX Redux
In Visual Studio Code, open the Run and Debug side-panel (press Ctrl + Shift + D )
Select either Game (Redux, Debug) and Game (Redux, Release)

Game should now start in the emulator, and Visual Studio Code has a debugger attached.

**Disclaimer: **The debugger is a bit wonky and unstable, so use at your own discretion (e.g. you cannot set breakpoints while it is running, you cannot always see the callstack and it may break at a different line than where you have put your breakpoint).

Running and debugging on hardware

Running it on hardware is a bit more complicated and a bit unstable workflow, and is therefor not fully described here. But in short:

You must have a memory card with Unirom installed
- Or a modchipped PlayStation and a CD with Unirom installed
A USB to PlayStation's serial cable (which must be custom-made)
Download NOTPSXSerial (nops) to connect to PlayStation
To debug you
- Connect PlayStation and PC using serial cable
- Start Unirom on the PlayStation
- Run nops in terminal: nops /fast /gdb 127.0.0.1:3334 COM3 /m
- In Visual Studio Code (with your project open) run the Game (Hardware, Debug) or Game (Hardware, Release) configurations.

You can also burn the game the onto a physical disk, by using the image file, which is automatically built in the build-step and to be found as build/<project_name>.bin and build/<project_name>.cue (this require you to modchip or softmod your hardware).

General code pointers

Types are in PascalCase, functions, members, namespaces and variables are in lower_case_snake_case, and macros are in CAPITALIZED_SNAKE_CASE
All Tundra types and functions exist in the td namespace
All Tundra macros start with TD_
Everything in td::internal and headers in an internal folder is not intended to be used by the user
All Tundra headers exist in <tundra/...>
There is no particular pattern in subfolders in <tundra/...>
Headers may be split into three parts, with each parts including the ones above:
- header.fwd.hpp: contains only forward declarations of types and global functions
- header.dec.hpp: contains definition of types (structs and classes), but only declarations of member functions
- header.hpp: contains full definition of class methods (unless they exist in a .cpp file)
Compilation times may improve drastically, if you only include what you need, instead of including header.hpp every time.

Setup and game loop

To use the engine, you must not provide your own main function, but instead it is started by including the <tundra/startup.hpp> in some translation unit, and defining the following two functions and global variable:

// Read by engine before init
const td::EngineSettings ENGINE_SETTINGS { };

// Run at start-up
void initialize(td::EngineSystems& engine_systems) { }

// Run every frame (game loop)
void update(td::EngineSystems& engine_systems, const td::FrameTime& frame_time) { }

The engine_systems arguments holds references to all the engine systems (asset loader, time, input, sound player).

Note: These are already defined in the Tundra game template.

Assets

The engine supports automatic compilation and inclusion of raw assets (.png, .obj, .wav) to formats that the engine can load and use.

Include asset

Assets are added in the assets.cmake file like so:

set(ASSETS
	<asset>
	...
	<asset>
)

Each <asset> is of the format:

<type> <code-name> <path> <param> ... <param>

where

type: type of the asset, is either MODEL, TEXTURE or SOUND
code-name: the name of the global variable in code pointing to the asset data
path: path to the asset, relative to the asset directory
param: optional parameters on the asset, depending on the asset type (see assets types below)

Using asset

To use the asset in code, you must first create an external global variable using the code name you gave the asset:

extern "C" const td::uint8 <code name>[];

The asset must then be loaded using the AssetLoader:

extern void initialize(td::EngineSystems& engine_systems) {
    td::AssetLoader& asset_loader = engine_systems.asset_loader;
    
    td::ModelAsset* model = asset_loader.load_model(<code name>);
    td::TextureAsset* texture = asset_loader.load_texture(<code name>);
    td::SoundAsset* sound = asset_loader.load_sound(<code name>);
}

Textures

Textures are compiled using img2tim and thus supports any file type that it supports (tested with .png and .jpg), but they are limited to 256x256 pixels.

By default they are compiled as full-color textures (every pixel has a distinct color), but you can compile it using a palette instead (CLUT) to reduce the size by specifying either of the following parameters:

PALETTE4: image has at most 16 colors
PALETTE8: image has at most 256 colors

Models

Models must be in OBJ format and are compiled using a custom compiler.

It does not support all features of OBJ, but it supports the following:

Normals
Indexed mode for vertices, UVS and normals
Textures (see below)
Diffuse material color
Smooth and flat shading

With texture

If a model has a texture, UVs will be automatically compiled, but the texture must be included separately. In code, when loading the model, the loaded texture must be passed as a parameter to load_model.

Sound

Sounds must be in 16-bit PCM .wav format with a single channel (mono), and are compiled using es-ps2-vag-tool.

A sound can be marked as looping by specifying the LOOP parameter. There is no distinction between music and sound effects, but sounds used for music must be looping.

Entity system

The game object system consists of two concepts: components and entities.

Component: customizable data type (through inheritance) to which arbitrary systems can apply behavior through iteration.
Entity: a group of component.

The relevant headers are found in: <tundra/engine/entity-system/..>

Defining custom component

class MyComponent : public td::Component<MyComponent> {
public 
	int value;  
};

Creating component/entity

td::Entity* entity = td::Entity::create();
MyComponent* my_component = entity->add_component<MyComponent>();
my_component->value = 42;

Deleting component/entity

my_component->destroy(); // Only destroys this component
entity->destroy(); // Also destroys all components on entity

Applying behavior

Components have no "update" function (like you see in Unity). Instead, behavior is applied to components by iterating all components of a given type:

void bar() {
	for( MyComponent* my_component : MyComponent::get_all() ) {
        my_component->value++;
    }
}

This provides flexibility, as it allows any system to apply any logic to any number of components any number of times.

Component references

Entity and component memory addresses are stable, so you can safely store their pointers. But the system also has a reference count mechanism, that allows you to avoid dangling pointers by using the ComponentRef class. The ComponentRef will automatically be nullptr if the component that it references is destroyed.

#include <tundra/engine/entity-system/component-ref.hpp>

td::Entity* entity = td::Entity::create();
MyComponent* my_component = entity->add_component<MyComponent>();
td::ComponentRef<MyComponent> ref = my_component;

if( ref != nullptr ) {
    TD_DEBUG_LOG("Ref is valid");
}

my_component->destroy();

if( ref == nullptr ) {
    TD_DEBUG_LOG("Ref is invalid");
}

Things to be aware of

There can be at most 255 references to the same component
A ComponentRef will clear its reference count to a component when the reference is accessed and the component is destroyed, and while any ComponentRef has a reference to a component, its memory will not be freed (it will be destroyed though).
Because entities are technically also components, you can also have a td::ComponentRef<td::Entity>

Transforms

In Tundra, the entity system has no inherent knowledge of the concept of transforms. Instead, transforms are just regular components. Meaning that an entity can have an arbitrary number of transforms.

Transform types

There are 2 types of transforms:

DynamicTransform: Can have a parent and children, and can be changed after constructing (92 bytes). Useful for moving objects (e.g. player)
StaticTransform: Cannot have a parent nor children, and it must given its matrix at construction (44 bytes). Useful for environment (e.g. a tree or rock).

Both transforms inherit the abstract Transform class. Other components that needs a transform (such as a Model) require an Transform in its constructor.

Example:

td::Entity* entity = td::Entity::create();
td::DynamicTransform* transform_1 = entity->add_component<td::DynamicTransform>();
td::DynamicTransform* transform_2 = entity->add_component<td::DynamicTransform>();
td::StaticTransform* transform_3 = entity->add_component<td::StaticTransform>(..);

transform_1->add_child(transform_2);

Transform matrices

To retrieve the local-to-world matrix, or the TransformMatrix, of a transform and use it to transform a vector you may use the hardware accelerated computation functions:

#include <tundra/gte/compute-transform.hpp>

td::Transform* transform = /* ... */;

td::TransformMatrix world_matrix = td::gte::compute_world_matrix(transform);

td::Vec3<td::Fixed16<12>> v = /* ... */;
Vec3<Fixed32<12>> v_world = td::gte::apply_transform_matrix(world_matrix, v);

DynamicTransform caches its transform matrix, meaning it will only be calculated when needed and only recomputed if it has changed (various optimizations are done here to limit what is recomputed).

The StaticTransform stores its matrix directly, and thus involves no computation. This can also be fetched directly.

The header also contains other transform matrix functions, including multiplication of matrices, extraction of rotation matrices and computation of the inverse transform matrix.

Rendering

The engine automatically runs the rendering logic after the update(..) function has been called. You utilize the rendering features by

Adjusting lighting settings in the RenderSystem accessed via the EngineSystems (ambient lighting and 3 directional lights are available)
Setup a Camera component along with layer settings
Create renderable components that are either Model, SpriteandText`

Camera

To render anything you must create at least one Camera component, which is assigned a Transform at construction. For every camera, every renderable component is rendered in relation to the camera's transform position and view direction. The camera's view direction is the camera's local negative z-axis (engine uses right-handed coordinate system).

auto layer_settings = // ... See below
    
td::Entity* camera_entity = td::Entity::create();

td::DynamicTransform* camera_transform = 
    camera_entity->add_component<td::DynamicTransform>();

td::Camera* camera = 
    camera_entity->add_component<td::Camera>(camera_transform, layer_settings);

The renderer automatically picks up every camera, so there is no need to register it with the renderer.

You can manually manipulate the camera's transform to change its view direction, but you can also use the look_at function:

camera->transform->set_translation({1, 0, 1})
camera->look_at({0, 0, 0 });

Layers

All renderable components are assigned to a layer, which is just an integer ID, and a camera has a list of layers that it renders.

Note: Because you currently cannot set which part of the framebuffer that a camera renders to, the multiple camera functionality is not all that useful (e.g. you cannot do split screen or a rearview camera).

Every camera can setup its own depth settings for every layer: how far it renders and the resolution of the depth (number of distinct depth values in the depth range). Increasing the resolution, increases the memory overhead of the camera (2 bytes per value).

Example:

const td::uint32 LAYER_UI = 0;
const td::uint32 LAYER_WORLD = 1;
const td::uint32 LAYER_GROUND = 2;

td::List<td::CameraLayerSettings> layer_settings;
layer_settings.add({LAYER_UI, 1});
layer_settings.add({LAYER_WORLD, 2048});
layer_settings.add({LAYER_GROUND, 128});

camera_entity->add_component<td::Camera>(
    camera_transform, 
    layer_settings
);

Models

Models are instances of 3D ModelAssets, including various instance settings such as a transform and tint.

td::Entity* entity = td::Entity::create();

td::Transform* transform = /* .. */;
td::uint32* layer = /* .. */;
td::ModelAsset* model_asset = /* .. */;

td::Model* model = entity->add_component<td::Model>(
    model_asset,
    layer, 
    transform
);

Sprites

Sprites are instances TextureAsset's' in screen space including various instance settings such as position, rotation, size and tint.

td::uint32* layer = /* .. */;
td::TextureAsset* texture = /* .. */;

td::Entity* e = td::Entity::create();
td::Sprite* sprite = e->add_component<td::Sprite>(layer);
sprite->texture = texture;
sprite->size = { 32, 32 };
sprite->position = { 64, 64 };

Screen space is 320x240 with (0, 0) being top left and (320,240) being bottom right.

Text

Tundra does not have proper UI text support, but it exposes psn00bsdk's debug font API via the component system.

td::uint32* layer = /* .. */;

td::Entity* entity = td::Entity::create();
td::Text* text_component = entity->add_component<td::Text>(layer);
text_component->text = "Hello word!";
text_component->position = { 64, 64};

The text is limited in that you cannot change the text's font, size, color or rotation.

Sound

To play sound you must use the SoundPlayer provided with the EngineSystems, and you can play either music or sound effects.

Example:

td::SoundAsset* my_sound_effect;
td::SoundAsset* my_music;

void update(td::EngineSystems& engine_systems, const td::FrameTime& frame_time) { 
	
    td::uint32 play_id = engine_systems.sound_player.play_sound(my_sound_effect);
    engine_systems.sound_player.stop_sound(play_id);
    
    engine_systems.play_music(my_music);
    engine_systems.stop_music();
}

Whether the sound is looping is given by the sound asset (see Assets)

Input

Input is handled by polling the state of either of the two controllers (IController) in the Input class provided by the EngineSystems.

Example:

void update(td::EngineSystems& engine_systems, const td::FrameTime& frame_time) { 
	
    IController& controller_1 = engine_systems.input.controller_1;
    IController& controller_2 = engine_systems.input.controller_2;
    
    if( controller_1.is_pressed(td::Button::R1) ) {
        if( controller_1.is_pressed_this_frame(td::Button::Circle) ) {
            // Circle is pressed this frame (and not last frame) while R1 is 			 	// being pressed
        }
    }
	
    if( controller_2.is_active() ) {
        if( controller_2.is_pressed(td::Button::Cross) ) {
            // Cross is pressed on controller 2
        }
    }
}

Utility

The engine contains various utility, some of which covers the lack of an STL implementation. All of these utility classes exists in <tundra/core/...> headers

Fixed-point class

Header: <tundra/core/fixed.hpp>

The PlayStation does not have hardware support for floating point numbers and instead uses fixed point numbers. Tundra has a some types two template types to represent such numbers: a 16-bit type Fixed16<TNumFractionBits> and a 32-bit type Fixed32<TNumFractionBits>.

The most common value for TNumFractionBits is 12, as that is what is used by the PlayStation hardware.

They support most of the operators you will need such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and casts in a type-safe manner.

Constructing

Integers (both constant expressions and non-constant expressions) can implicitly be cast to a fixed-pointer number:

int i = /* value from somewhere */;
td::Fixed16<12> f = 15;
td::Fixed32<12> f = i;

This cast incurs a single bit-shift.

You can construct a fixed-point number from a double value that is a constant expression, such as a double literal using the td::to_fixed:

td::Fixed32<12> f = td::to_fixed(12.5);

This is a consteval API that ensures the constant expression double is converted to a fixed-point type at compile time.

Math

The <tundra/core/math.hpp> includes various math functions that operates on the fixed-point types, including sin, cos, abs and so on. These implementations are from fpm repository.

List

Header: <tundra/core/list.hpp>

Just a simple dynamic array implementation with geometric growth. This is the only container provided by engine.

td::List<int> l;
l.reserve(16);
l.add(10);
bool was_removed = l.remove(12);
int index = l.index_of(10);
bool contains = l.contains(42);
l.clear();

String

Header: <tundra/core/string.hpp>

A dynamic character array implementation very similar to std::string.

td::String s = "Hello, ";
td::String s2 = "World!";
td::String s3 = s1 + S2;

From format

Using the header <tundra/core/string-util.hpp>, you can create a td::String from a string format (like printf):

td::String s = td::string_util::create_from_format("(%d, %d)", 10, 15);

To string

You can convert various primitives and types to a td::String using the specializations and overloads td::to_string<T>:

td::String s1 = td::to_string(10);

td::Fixed16<12> f = td::to_fixed(4.5);
td::String s2 = td::to_string(f);

You can implement a specialization for this function for you own types as well:

struct MyStruct {
	int i, j;
};

td::String td::to_string(const MyStruct& my_struct) {
	return td::string_util::create_from_format("(%d, %d)", i, j);
}

Debug log

To utilize String for printing, you can use the TD_DEBUG_LOG macro from <tundra/core/log.hpp> header. This uses printf-like formatting, but it can also print String objeccts and types that has a td::to_string implementation using the %s format:

TD_DEBUG_LOG("%d", 42);

td::String s = "Hello world";
TD_DEBUGLOG("%s", s);

td::Fixed32<12> f = /* .. */;
TD_DEBUG_LOG("%s", f);

Debug logs are automatically compiled out when doing a Release build.

Debug asserts

Header: <tundra/core/assert.hpp>

Asserts whether a given expression is true, and if not, it will print the given message and halt the program:

int i = / * ... */;
int j = / * ... */;
TD_ASSERT(i == j, "%d does not equal %d", i, j);

Unfortunately, I did not get around to support the same functionality as with TD_DEBUG_LOG, so you must manually convert non-primitive objects and td::String to a C-strings:

td::String s = "Hello world";
TD_ASSERT(false, "%s", s.get_c_string());

td::Fixed32<12> f = /* .. */;
TD_ASSERT(false, "%s", td::to_string(f).get_c_string());

Matrices and vectors

Headers: <tundra/core/vec/vec3.hpp>, <tundra/core/vec/vec2.hpp>, <tundra/core/mat/mat3x3.hpp>

The engine contains some very simple template types for 2D and 3D vectors and 3x3 matrices that supports some simple addition, subtraction and comparison operations.

td::Vec3<int>`v1 { 1, 2, 3 };
td::Vec3<int>`v2 { 4 };
td::Vec3<int> v3 = v1 + v2;

td::Vec2<td::Fixed32<12>> v4;

td::Mat3x3<td::Fixed16<12>> m {
    1, 2, 3,
    4, 5, 6,
    7, 8, 9
};

Hardware acceleration

Header: <tundra/gte/operations.hpp>

A few hardware accelerated operations exists for specific combinations of Vec3 and Mat3x3 using Fixed32 and Fixed16 as template types, including multiplication, normalization and creation of a rotation matrix.

Example:

Mat3x3<Fixed16<12>> m1;
Mat3x3<Fixed16<12>> m2;

Mat3x3<Fixed16<12>> m3 = td::gte::multiply(m1, m2);

Development on the engine

This contains information on how to develop the engine, which is an unlikely use-case as the repository is discontinued. But for preservation, and in case some one wants to fork it and make some changes, I put a guide for it here.

Setup

Development on the engine requires the same tools (VS Code and emulator) as for developing games, so see the Setup tools section for this.

You must also install Visual Studio 2022.

Besides that, you only need to clone the repository - all other dependencies, including CMake, SDK and debugger, are included in the repository.

Project structure

The engine's projects, source code and tests are split in three layers:

playstation: runs on the PlayStation (e.g. has dependencies on the PlayStation)
developer: runs on the developers platform (e.g. tools such as the model compiler)
base: used for both the developers and PlayStation layers (i.e. cross-platform)

playstation and developer does not depend on each other, but both depends on base.

The physical layout of the engine mostly follows The Pitchfork Layout:

include: Contains all the API headers (i.e. the ones that the game will include)
- This is split into base, developer and playstation
- These headers cannot include anything from src
- Anything in include/base/core/ must not include anything outside that folder
src: Contains all the source and header files that are not part of the engine API
- Can include headers from include
tests: contains test source code and data
- tests/data/: assets used for tests
- tests/automated/: source code for tests that can be run and validated automatically (e.g. unit tests) using the custom testing framework
  - One folder for each layer
- tests/manual/: more complex tests that must be run and validated manually (i.e. sandbox-like projects)
  - One folder for each layer
tools:
- build: Contains the CMake project files for each of the projects (instead of putting them in src) as well as batch scripts for generating and building the different projects. There is a folder for each of the three components (base, developer, playstation)
- cmake: Contains some CMake used across CMake projects
external: contains all the external dependencies for the engine, including both tools and libraries
.vscode: it is intentional that this is included in the repository as it contains debugging configurations and clangd settings (for syntax highlighting)

Build

The engine is built with batch scripts through a terminal (like the game):

Open the tundra repository folder in your terminal
Build the developer layer (only contains asset compiler required for tests):
1. Run tools\build\developer\generate
2. Run tools\build\developer\build debug
3. Run tools\build\developer\build release
Build the engine
1. Run tools\build\playstation\generate
2. Run tools\build\playstation\build debug
3. Run tools\build\playstation\build release

Deploy (full build)

You can "deploy" the engine, which will build everything and generate an output folder with all the required libraries, headers and dependencies that a game needs:

Open the tundra folder in your terminal
Run tools\build\deploy
Output is put in build\deploy\

Development environment

`playstation`

Developing the playstation layer, you must use Visual Studio Code which utilizes the clangd extension as a language server to provide syntax highlighting, code correction and suggestions.

`developer`

Developing the developer layer (currently only asset compiler), you must use Visual Studio and open the build\developer\td.developer.sln.

Running tests

Note: The base layer contains many tests, but these are not run on their own. They are executed either on developer (Windows) or playstation (emulator or hardware) when running the tests for either layer.

`playstation`

Build the playstation projects (see above)
Open PCSX Redux
Open repository in Visual Studio Code
Open Run and Debug panel (Ctrl + Shift + D)
Select debug configuration:
- Automated Tests (<Redux|Hardware>, <Debug|Release>)
  - Runs the automated tests on either hardware or in emulator (Redux). To run on hardware, see Running and debugging on hardware
- Tests: <Manual Test> (<Redux|Hardware>, Debug)
  - Runs one of the manual tests (will produce some visual output in the emulator). Only Debug configuration exists for these for simplicity.
Press Start Debugging (green play button), or press F5

`developer`

Build the developer projects (see above)
Open build\developer\td.developer.sln solution in Visual Studio
Build solution (Build > Build Solution)
Run the td.developer.tests.automated project

Note: No manual tests exists for this layer at the moment.

Sandbox project

Note: You may want to setup a personal sandbox project where you can write ad-hoc tests to test changes made to the engine. You can do this using the Tundra game template (see the Game Setup section), and update the engine using the guide below.

Update engine in game

To update the engine of the template repository, or a copy of it (i.e. a game or sandbox project), you must do the following:

Setup the engine repository path for the game project (only once):
- Create the file <game_project>\tools\update-tundra\source-path
- In the file, paste the full path to the tundra repository (e.g. C:\Users\malte\projects\tundra)
Build and deploy the Tundra engine
Update the game's engine:
- Open game project folder in terminal
- Run tools\update-tundra\update
Re-generate and re-build your game

Benchmarks

The GIF shows a demo of a short 15-seconds benchmarking game.

Statistics

The statistics are measured on an actual PlayStation model SCPH-7502 (PAL). They just gives a rough overview, and it is not a "real" game nor is it optimized, but the benchmark hints at what the engine is capable of.

Runs at 25 FPS (common framerate for PSX games)
32 - 43 model components processed every frame
297 - 812 triangles rendered every frame
110 - 160 components simulated
Render stage (submitting to GPU) takes 18.7 - 30.7 ms
Rasterizing (GPU) takes 10.2 - 13.3 ms (runs in parallel with rest of frame)
Simulation stage (movement, collision etc.) takes 5.2 - 7.8 ms
Uses a total 250 KiB memory, including 121 KiB code and assets (rest is heap)
500 KiB VRAM used (~50%)
268 KiB SRAM used (~50%)

Note: The engine has few culling mechanism meaning even the invisible geometry incurs a significant cost.

Asset credit

The demo uses assets from the Space Kit by Kenney, along with some custom-made assets.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 179 Commits
.vscode		.vscode
data		data
external		external
include		include
src		src
tests		tests
tools		tools
.gitignore		.gitignore
license.md		license.md
readme.md		readme.md
thesis.pdf		thesis.pdf

License

maltebp/tundra

Folders and files

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Tundra

Content

Thesis

Acknowledgements

Features

Missing features and limitations

How to use

Game setup

Setup tools

Setup game project

Project structure

Building the game

Running and debugging the game in emulator

Running and debugging on hardware

General code pointers

Setup and game loop

Assets

Include asset

Using asset

Textures

Models

Sound

Entity system

Defining custom component

Creating component/entity

Deleting component/entity

Applying behavior

Component references

Transforms

Transform types

Transform matrices

Rendering

Camera

Layers

Models

Sprites

Text

Sound

Input

Utility

Fixed-point class

Constructing

Math

List

String

From format

To string

Debug log

Debug asserts

Matrices and vectors

Hardware acceleration

Development on the engine

Setup

Project structure

Build

Deploy (full build)

Development environment

playstation

developer

Running tests

playstation

developer

Sandbox project

Update engine in game

Benchmarks

Statistics

Asset credit

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