Starlight.jl

Julia is a greedy language, surrounded by a community of greedy people, who deserve greedy frameworks to make their greedy applications.

With a focus on flexibility and code quality, Starlight aims to be such a framework. It includes a suite of components and integrations that make it particuarly well-suited for video games, so it is not a stretch to call it a "game engine". However, Starlight is most fundamentally a scripting layer for SDL, Vulkan, and Bullet (via the Telescope backend), meaning it can be used for any application that needs high-performance rendering and physics. Furthermore, there are plans to allow selective enabling of different subsystems, meaning it could be used for GUI apps or pure physics simulation or anything else you can imagine.

Installation

In your Julia environment, you can simply

julia> ] add Starlight

Basic Usage

Starlight projects are simply Julia projects, no special structure or anything, so you simply declare that you are

julia> using Starlight

To take advantage of the magic of Starlight you must first create an App:

julia> a = App()

This gets you an internal clock, message bus, entity component system, rendering, physics, input, and sound, although it doesn't do anything with them yet. To open a window and start running the initialized subsystems, you can call

julia> awake!(a)

To close everything down, call

julia> shutdown!(a)

If running in a script you will need to keep the Julia process alive, so instead of awake!(a) you can use

julia> run!(a)

...which, as shown, works in the REPL as well.

Before you try doing anything interesting with the library, it is recommended that you read the docs.

Contributing

We welcome issues, pull requests, everything. If there's a feature or use case we don't support and you don't have time to implement it yourself, create an issue. If you do have time, create a pull request. There's a ton of work to be done and only one active contributor. Anything you have to offer will be appreciated. Authors of pull requests will also get a special mention and a description of the work they did further down here in the README.

The maintainer is willing to personally mentor anyone who wants to either contribute or to learn Starlight for their own use cases. Contact information below. Please reach out.

Bounties

Some issues may have monetary rewards attached to them. Pull requests addressing these issues will be scrutinized more thoroughly than others. Get in touch with the maintainer to discuss payment arrangements.

Where did the maintainer get so much money for bounties?

He didn't. He is taking a calculated risk that 1) being in debt to contributors is better than being in debt to, say, a credit card company and 2) that the rate of issue resolution will not exceed his income. Note that this means you may not get paid immediately. But on our honor, you will get paid.

No advance payments will be made under any circumstances

Otherwise problems would arise if the issue in question was resolved by a different contributor.

READ THIS BEFORE YOU WORK ON A BOUNTY ISSUE

Get in touch with the maintainer first. Collaborate with him on a proper proposal. Then he will assign you the issue(s) and pay you when they are resolved.

If you resolve a bounty issue without submitting a proposal first, your code will get used but you will not be paid.

You have been warned.

Contact

You are invited to join us on Discord.

The maintainer is also reachable by email and typically answers within 24 hours.