The Acclimate SDK is the core of the whole engine. It is used to build all the tools, plugins, and can be used to build a complete game in C++. It is build of multiple modules, each of which covers a different aspect of game development. All modules make heavy use of C++11-features to improve performance and usability:

– Audio: Offers XAudio2-binding to play sound-effects and music, without having to deal with the libraries specialities. Different audio-APIs are planned for the future, those will only slightly modify the modules interfaces and allow you to continue developing your games sound without great changes.

– Core: Has many vital tools for developing a game application, like the resource and plugin system, and utility classes like signals. Every application built upon the Acclimate SDK will use this module.

– Entity: The Acclimate SDK offers a full-fleged entity-component system, which allows you to make use of this modern programming paradigm for maximum flexibilty and performance when designing your game world. The Acclimate engine has no default components itself, but it offers full support for plugins and scripts to have just the features your game might need.

– Gfx: The graphics module offers a wide range of different interfaces like models and textures, to allow the employement of realtime rendering techniques, without having to care about the native API code. The engine offers compile-time determination of which API to use, but most code can be written without knowing which API is chosen in the end.

– Gui: No game goes without some sort of user interaction, and the Acclimate SDK offers a gui that is fully integrated within the engine, and therefore allows easy integration into your game. The gui is fully rendered using the current chosen graphics API, and is therefore completely platform independent.

– Input: Using the engines input handling, you will never have to worry about processing window messages again. With a key-to-action mapping system, input can be processes regaredeless of whether a keyboard, gamepad, or joystick is used.

– Math: A variety of math-related classes come with this module, such as vectors and matrices. It also currently holds different volumes and collision methods, though these will be moved to the physics-module once it is there.

– Render: Much like the graphics module, this one deals with the facettes of bringing your game world to the screen. In here however, the focus lies more on actually processing the render command list, produces by the graphics module, using a high performance render-queue based architecture. This module also pretty much eliminated any need for you to care about details like render order, clearing buffers, etc… in your code.

– Script: Using an even more object oriented AngelScript-wrapper, you can develope gameplay in the C++-like scripting language without ever touching any actual code.  While this might not be the best place to put an ambient occlusion algorithm, it offers the right flexibility to e.g. customize entity behaviour for a special part of the game, without having to write entire C++ classes.

– System: Much like the core module, system has a whole bunch of utility classes, but here they are of a more general nature. Logging, string conversions, bit helpers, everything is here.

– File, XML: The acclimate SDK also features its own XML-parser, and some utility methods for dealing with file and directory paths.

– Physics: [Not developed yet]

– AI: [Not developed yet]

Don’t like to touch low-level code yourself? Do you hate C++? Are you really fond of the way Unity, CryEngine, Unreal Engine all offer nice GUIs to put together your game? Then this part of the acclimate engine is for you. Since the Acclimate engine is mostly data-driven anyway in terms of resource handling, entities, etc…, the editor is a perfect fit. The Acclimate editor is not specialized to one type of game, instead it offers basic entity, assets, scripts and project managing capabilities, but most of the functionality comes from the plugins themselves. If you use a plugin for seamless open-world terrain, it can also implement all editing functionality using the editors own little SDK. The editor is built upon the Acclimate SDK, and makes heavy use of e.g. its GUI-functionality.

The editor itself is in a very early stage, so features might heavily vary once I’ve progressed.

While the editor is nice to create content, at one time you might want to release your game. Many of the trade-offs that might occur if you want to be able to edit your unfinished game now doesn’t apply anymore. The player will be able to play a specialized, optimized format that the editor can export, allowing for extra fast loading times, and possibly other speed improvements.

The player also is in rather an early phase, and the described special format does not exist yet.