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[Ivan]

Hello!

There is a very old topic for this in Technical, but I wanted to start a proper thread here and keep it up to date, so forgive the double post.

For the good part of the past 6 years I've been working on a massive cross-platform development framework called Polycode. It is designed to be used as both a C++ library and a standalone Lua-based scripting system with bindings to the main C++ core, which can publish to multiple platforms, not unlike Love2D, only with the ability to be distributed as a standalone executable and with a lot more features.

The core of Polycode provides easy access to accelerated 2d and 3d graphics, shaders, skeletal animation, physics, sound, windowing, config/data loading and pretty much everything you might need to develop games and other applications. It currently runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

I released Polycode publicly over a year ago, and have been slowly working on fixing bugs and polishing the existing features, but one thing I always really wanted to do was to turn it into a sort of open source answer to Unity.

I have used Polycode in my own work to build everything from 2d platformers to first person shooters, so the features are by and large already there, but I always wanted to make it a standalone development tool like Unity, and the time for that has come.

I am currently gearing up to releasing Polycode for the first time as a standalone application (along with the usual C++ SDK of course). It will have a script editor, a 2d layout editor and a visual material editor and will be able to publish directly to Windows, Mac and Linux (from any of the three).  The next release will have a 3d editor and more granular shader editor options.

The IDE is actually written IN Polycode, which has its own complete UI toolkit, so that gives you an idea of what it can possibly do.

We're getting close to the initial binary release, but you can build it from source if you're feeling adventurous.

Here's a screenshot of the 2d layout editor editing a 2d platformer level:



You can find more info on the site: http://polycode.org/

[yadurajiv]

For the longest time I was wondering what had happened

It is really great to see an update. All the best and hope we see a release soon

[krasse]

This sounds like an interesting project.
It is very good with an open source game engine/editor. When a feature is missing in Unity, it is just so annoying to not be able to do anything about it.

[vivavolt]

This excites me, I will be staying tuned. I was hanging out for the Dec 12 release so that's a bit upsetting but, oh well, indie life and deadlines don't mix.

[agersant]

Glad to see you're still working on this. I still haven't given your engine a proper go but I want to use it for my next project.

[Dr. Cooldude]

Yay, following this (again lol).

[Arnaud DE BOCK]

Can´t wait to try it!

[JMickle]

i'm VERY excited for it's release

[Code_Assassin]

i'm VERY excited for it's release

  same here.

[Harry Harrison]

i'm VERY excited for it's release

  same here.

And here. 

[emacs]

Seems really cool, I'll definitely be keeping my eye on this.

[Frooxius]

This seems like a very interesting project, the editor caught my attention: it looks simple, clean and polished, something I would personally like to play with, but that's just a first impression from a screenshot of course.

May I ask what other platforms are planned? Or specifically Android/iOS/WP8? What about web? I am assuming the ones for which you can compile the C++ library and tie it to that platform's API, so something like HTML5 export would require a lot of work.

But anyway, good work seems promising

[Ivan]

I've written an experimental browser plugin that plays the polyapp files that Polycode creates (kind of like swfs or jars). It works similar to the Unity player, but it has absolutely no security sandboxing, so I want to hold off on distributing it while I think about security options. The thing is that Polycode allows you to bundle modules in the polyapp files, which are basically arbitrary dlls wrapped in Lua code. That means that you can potentially execute any code through the browser and that is, of course, extremely unsafe. Java does the same thing, but it asks you explicitly if you trust the application before loading any custom dlls. I guess that's always a path I can take, but I have to think about it.

There is iOS and Android support planned, but it's not currently a major focus. I want to make sure everything is nice and stable on the main 3 platforms first, and then port to iOS/Android.

[xgalaxy]

How out of date is the polycode source up on github right now?
If I were to pull that down and start using it would it not work with the as yet to be released version?

[Ivan]

The github code is very recent, but a bunch of stuff is broken on Windows and Linux. I do most of my development on a Mac, and then go into Windows and Linux and fix everything I broke while writing new code So, I would advise against it for now.

[team_q]

Hey, Rad!

[Ivan]

Here's a shot of a game I am making to test things out:

[RyanHuggins]

Dude. I'm so in on this, you don't even know. Haha.

Are you aiming to release a version anytime soon? I'm designing a game (Voyage) that I think I might want to make in this engine. Haha.

Also, if I were to script/code in this engine it would be in Lua/C++? I'm looking for an engine where I have to learn to code in a "real" language that's not like, GML. Haha

[Ivan]

Yeah, you can use it by writing Lua directly in the IDE (or in your own editor + the Polycode command line build tools if that pleases you more, though the IDE has some rudimentary debugging built in) or use the C++ library.

[Ivan]

Here's a shot of the sprite editor. It's pretty bare bones, but there isn't much more to it.