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Nitro Engine

Introduction

This is a 3D game engine, a lot of functions designed to simplify the process of making a 3D game. It isn't standalone, it needs libnds to work.

You can use Nitro Engine with BlocksDS and devkitPro, but BlocksDS is preferred as some features of Nitro Engine are only available with BlocksDS.

Features:

  • Support for static models, converted from OBJ files.
  • Support for animated models, thanks to the DSMA library, which converts MD5 models (with skeletal animation) into a format that can be rendered with hardware acceleration. It can also blend two animations together (for transitions).
  • Support for all format of textures (even compressed textures, thanks to ptexconv).
  • Dual 3D (render 3D to both screens, but at 30 FPS instead of 60 FPS).
  • Functions to render 2D images accelerated by 3D hardware.
  • Text system based on libDSF, which is based on BMFont.
  • Basic GUI elements like buttons and scrollbars.
  • Basic physic system: Axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABB) only.

Nitro Engine doesn't support any of the 2D hardware of the DS. In order to use the 2D hardware you can use libnds directly, or you can use a library like NFlib. There is an example of how to integrate Nitro Engine and NFlib in the same project here.

Setup

BlocksDS

  1. Clone this repository and run:

    make install -j`nproc`

    This should build the library in both debug and release modes and install it.

  2. If you want to check that everything is working as expected, open one of the folders of the examples and run:

    make

    That should build an .nds file that you can run on an emulator or real hardware.

Note: The build system of the examples in this repository is make. The makefiles aren't very flexible, and they don't support converting 3D models, or saving graphics or models to the filesystem (you can only inject them as data to the ARM9, which isn't acceptable for big games).

For BlocksDS, try ArchitectDS <https://github.com/AntonioND/architectds>. This build system written in Python supports converting every format that Nitro Engine supports, and it lets you save everything in NitroFS so that your game can grow as much as you want. ArchitectDS comes with plenty of examples of how to use it with Nitro Engine.

devkitpro

  1. Clone this repository. Create a symbolic link to it inside the devkitPro folder in your system. For example, in Linux, create a symlink so that /opt/devkitpro/nitro-engine points to the folder with Nitro Engine:

    ln -sT /path/to/nitro-engine /opt/devkitpro/nitro-engine

  2. Go to the nitro-engine folder and type this on the terminal:

    make dkp -j`nproc`

    This should build the library in both debug and release modes.

  3. If you want to check that everything is working as expected, open one of the folders of the examples and type make -f Makefile.dkp. That should build an .nds file that you can run on an emulator or real hardware.

Note: If you're using melonDS, remember that any example that uses NitroFS with will fail if it's built with the libraries that come with devkitPro because of a bug in the libraries. Other emulators like DeSmuME still work.

Common

Note that some features of the 3D hardware aren't emulated by most emulators, so you may need to use an actual NDS to test some things. melonDS seems to emulate all features correctly. DeSmuME doesn't emulate the polygon/vertices count registers, so the touch test feature of Nitro Engine doesn't work.

Normally you should link your programs with -lNE, which is the release version of Nitro Engine. If you want to use the debug features of Nitro Engine, you should link with -lNE_debug, and add -DNE_DEBUG to the CFLAGS and CPPFLAGS in your Makefile. Make sure to clean and rebuild your project after doing the changes mentioned in this step. Check the error_handling example to see how to use the debug mode of Nitro Engine.

Screenshots

Screenshots of some of the examples included with Nitro Engine:

Animated model Box tower physics
animated_model box_tower
Hardware fog Specular material
fog specular_material
Text Shadow volume
text shadow_volume
Screen effects 2D sprites
screen_effects sprites

Contact

This project is currently hosted on GitHub at:

https://github.com/AntonioND/nitro-engine

If you want to contact me (Antonio Niño Díaz) directly you can email me at:

antonio underscore nd at outlook dot com

License

The code of this repository is under the MIT license. The examples are under the CC0-1.0 license.

The full text of the licenses can be found under the licenses folder.

Future work

  • Asynchronous loading of assets (loading textures during VBL).

Thanks to