WaterDropEngine

Presentation

WaterDropEngine (WDE) is a 3D game engine in Rust.

As its name suggests, it is designed to be small, simple and efficient. It is also my personal project, so it is not intended to be used by other people, but rather to be a playground for me to learn and experiment with game engine development.

Therefore, I do not intend to make it a full-featured engine, but rather to focus on the core features that I find interesting and useful for my own projects. I will not take into account pull requests or issues from other people, but I will be happy to answer any questions or give any advice to anyone who wants to learn game engine development.

Demo

WaterDrop Terrain Generator is a node-based terrain generation and erosion tool built on top of WaterDropEngine, and is the main project currently exercising it.

Documentation

The documentation of the engine is available on the Github Pages of the project at this link. It is generated using GitHub Actions, so it is automatically updated every time I push a new commit to the main branch.

Dependencies

At its core, WaterDropEngine relies on:

• Bevy's ECS for the Entity Component System.
• wgpu for rendering, with a custom renderer built on top of it.
• Rapier for physics and simple ray casting.

Using the engine

To start using WaterDropEngine, you will need to have Rust installed on your computer. If you don't have it, you can install it by following the instructions on the official website.

Then, clone the repository using git clone https://github.com/explorablescience/WaterDropEngine.git, and run the examples with:

cargo run --bin wde-examples --package wde-examples --features log-debug,debug,watch

To build your own project on it, clone it next to your project and depend on the wde crate by path. Its modules are behind Cargo features, with three presets: minimal (the default: PBR rendering, cameras and glTF models), full (every runtime module, terrain and physics included) and everything (full plus the in-game editor tools):

[dependencies]
wde = { path = "../WaterDropEngine/crates/core/wde", features = ["full"] }

The engine assets (shaders, placeholder textures) are in res/core/: your project should expose them as its own res/core/ folder, for example with a symbolic link created by its build.rs.