The "LotusEngine"

"Project: Black Lotus" is just a codename to an otherwise un-announced and untitled thing. It has no name, it has no design, it's just a bed of technology that tries it's best to take a state machine it understands intimately, and try to sneeze that up in a window as fast as it can. As such the "engine" is rather bespoke, very purpose built, and if im being honest pretty tightly coupled. 

"Black Lotus" is a Magic: The Gathering card. A rare one. One that goes for tens of thousands of dollars these days on the market.  And I had one back in high school. Back then, it was worth something, but it wasn't all that special. At least as far as I could tell.  It's the "Card that got away" because I didn't know any better.  I called the project Black Lotus because.. well "graphics programming" was the "career that got away" because I didn't know any better.  

As I necro'd the project back from the dead, and I'm inching ever so closer and closer to having a realized usable toolkit with which to build a little game, it's time to put a name to the sucker. So regardless of what the name of the game winds up being, we're going to call my scrappy efforts underneath it the "LotusEngine" in honor of it's original codename. 

The LotusEngine is written in C++17 on Windows with Visual Studio 2017 (and 2022).  It uses SFML for creating a cross platform window and OpenGL rendering context.  It is OpenGL 3.3 running in Compatibility Mode, and uses the (rather embarrassingly) old Fixed Function Pipeline (In my defense: I didn't know any better when I started this thing).  It's a raycaster, so I get OpenGL to render a series of thin vertical quads to the screen. I created a custom map format with a layered tileset system for the walls, ceiling, floor, and collision maps and created an editor to author them in. 

This has been highly rewarding work and I'm looking forward to continue to see this project to fruition.