Black Shark Graphics Engine

What is it?

It's a young, a freely available, project that currently has a vector of development in the 2D area. Beside, if you want, you can create 3D objects (see tests example TBSTestMesh, TBSTestEarth in a unit bs.test.mesh.pas). A main purpose of the project is creating the simplest entities for simple access to OpenGL API abilities within of version >= ES2.

Platforms

• Windows
• Linux
• Ultibo
• Raspberry OS

Summary

• Core:

  • a renderer has been based on OpenGL ES 2.0 API; for access OpenGL context uses a library from Google project the Angle;
  • almost all events and animations have based on observer pattern;
  • no difference between 2D and 3D worlds; 2D objects are drawn over the nearest plane of frustum; if you want to use pure 2D-world only, you can set TBlackSharkFrustum.OrtogonalProjection in True, that allows avoid few distortions objects;
  • a window system for all input events (keyboard, mouse) is based on supplied component libraries in Delphi and Lazarus (VCL/FMX and LCL appropriately), but, if you want, you can replace its (bs.viewport.TBlackSharkViewPort) on own window system;
  • a pure Black Shark application (see examples "/tests/delphi/BSApplication" and "/tests/lazarus/BSApplication"); it is also supported by delphi for linux target compilation;
  • own system of windows (see example "bs.test.windows.TBSTestWindows" through command line parameters in "BSApplicatoin");
  • it has a canvas for creating any 2D-objects;
  • any graphic objects (2D or 3D) may be interactive;
  • a simple rasterizator is used for load of textures and draw of primitives in RAM (for example, for fonts rasterization);
  • own fonts system is not depending on OS;
  • a set of visual tests for many subsystems;

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  Fonts:

  • supports fonts TrueType loaded from files *.ttf, appropriately you can load any contours TrueType, for example, smiles (emoji);
  • it has own loader of TrueType fonts with accomplish of triangulation and rasterization (without the use of external tools);
  • characters output only by a mesh (allows to get good quality of big symbols);
  • characters output from a texture (allows to get relative good quality of small symbols) beforehand prepared by the rasterizator; the texture consists only of alpha (GL_ALPHA), that is why a font can reserve very large textures;
  • supports mixed mode (with the use a special class TTrueTypeRasterFont) allowing automaticaly for a size of font a smaller threshold to display from a texture and if the size more threshold to display from meshes;
  • for sharing between consumers and managing the lifetime fonts have automatic reference counting;

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• Textures:

  • supports tga, png (for load uses tools Delphi and FPC); it is easy to add support for new formats;
  • for sharing between consumers and managing the lifetime textures have automatic reference counting;

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• Geometry instansing:

  • implements software instancing, that is, to draw a mesh for every instance invokes glDrawElements, because a hardware support exists only in the GLES 3.0; in the future planned hardware implementation, as only will be add the support to the Angle project;

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• Particle system:

  • implements drawing many textured particles by single call glDrawElements for all particles; the every particle is a quad of a texture if a property TBlackSharkParticles.IsPoints equal false, otherwise it is a point;

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• Full screen anti-aliasing implemented with help shaders:

  • Fast approXimate (FXAA);
  • Multi Sampling (MSAA);
  • Super Sampling x4 (SSAA) (with help to render to texture more than screen in 2 times and further resample (on GPU, of course) to the viewport size; in Linux works a native implementation (TODO: include property EmbeddedSSAA to TBlackSharkViewPort for switch it);

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• Canvas:

  • it has a class bs.canvas.TBCanvas that is a simple group of 2d objects (descendants of a TCanvasObject);
  • the canvas has mechanism of scaling belonging its objects relative a size of the viewport;
  • the bs.canvas unit contains the set of some primitives, so as line, circle, arc, rectangle, triangle, curves and so on;
  • the canvas has scalable mode for automatic scaling of its objects when viewport changing;

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• Misc:

  • small and very usefull (IMHO) generic collections:
    • a list/stack;
    • a binary balanced tree (AVL-tree) that has time complexity O(log n) for all operations: search, insert and delete; a very usefull property: all values automatically ordered by key;
    • a hash-table that has time complexity O(1) in the average case;
    • a thread-safe FIFO queue (First In First Out) without using of OS objects for synchronization;
    • a bidirectional list allowing insert and delete to any position for time complexity O(1); one has cursor for access to items by index;
    • a virtual tree fits for any hierarchical data, save and load any earlier formed structures;
    • finite-state automaton (machine) presenting Aho–Corasick algorithm, for example, allowing quickly to find all sub-strings into an input stream of data;

Install

• download sources;
• unzip into a new directory, desirable consisting only of Latin characters;
• set paths in your IDE for search sources: root of the directory, /common, /core, /gui;
• set path for a output executable file to a directory /bin;
• for Win64 replace files libEGL.dll, libGLESv2.dll, opengl32.dll by files from a directory /bin/Win64.

Hello world