@woosh/meep-engine NPM

Meep Engine

Getting Started

We offer a minimal project with no bells or whistles, just enough to run the engine and get you starter. If you're starting from scratch this is likely the best option.

Documentation

Engine Documentation

Samples

To help get you started, various samples are provided under /samples folder. Feel free to use them as a point of reference.

Quality

Meep is covered by 2,073 unit tests

The aim is not to have 100% coverage, but to ensure quality. As a result, the tests are written to cover complex code first and to exhaustively validate critical algorithms. Most of the test code is significantly larger than the code that is being tested.

Features

Automatic instancing

This will minimize the number of draw calls and improve performance.

Decals

Decals in meep are done on the GPU, and as a result you can have a lot of them in your scene. The most I tested in a single scene is 1,000,000 which works quite well. Decals are useful for bullet holes, blood splatter and various scene decorations such as signs and scuff marks.

Clustered lighting, aka Forward+

Meep implements clustered lighting technique which allows you to have a pretty much an unlimited number of point lights in your scene. All the other light types are supported as well, but only point lights are clustered for now. Point lights are useful for various effects, like muzzle flashes, grenade explosions, torches, etc.

Particles

Meep's particle engine ("Particular") is optimized for game development needs, this means supporting complex effects and being able to spawn/destroy many particle systems every frame. There are a lot of particle engines out there, but they tend to have costly spawning routines, take up a lot of draw calls and not manage memory well, which leads to pretty poor performance in games. My particle engine supports full particle lighting as well, and soft particles. On top of that - all particles are automatically atlassed in the background and are compiled with just 4 shaders. This means that no matter how many particle effects you have - there will be no shader switching and no texture switching, and there will be no delays associated with shader compilation. Particles are culled, so particle systems that are off-screen are not rendered and simulation for them can be paused to save CPU resources (this is automatic behavior)

Trails

Meep implements a fairly complex trail system, where a trail can be attached to an entity, and it will create a trail behind.

Terrain

The terrain engine is chunk-based, which means that terrain is split into rectangular pieces internally, and they are built on-the-fly inside a web-worker based on camera position. Terrain is automatically culled based on camera position, so you're only drawing the chunks that are in view. Terrain supports layers just like Unity, but unlike Unity - Meep supports up to 256 layers of terrain instead of 4.

Sound engine

Meep has a custom sound engine which is culled and has custom attenuation, this allows scenes to have 1000s of positional audio sources without any extra cost in terms of performance

Asset streaming

Meep in general is a web-first engine, all assets are streamed, meaning that the engine is up and running even before any models/texture are loaded, and you're free to decide when to let the player see your level, wait until everything is loaded or drop them in as soon as you can. There is a pre-loader module in case you want to load some assets in bulk before starting the game.

AI tools

including, but not limited to:

full-fledged Behavior trees
Blackboard (took for recording information useful for AI to read/write relevant world state, very commonly used with Behavior Trees)
monte-carlo tree search (same as Google's AlphaGo, useful for decision-making)
state optimization (useful for decision-making)
grid-based path finding (optimized for 10,000s of queries per second)
resource allocation solver (useful for planning, given certain resources such as bullets/grenades/money/health - plan what actions to take to optimize your chances of winning)
and a number of other useful tools to complement AI development.

Inverse kinematics

Meep has 2 very useful IK solvers to fix foot position for characters on uneven terrain or stairs, aligning both the position and orientation of character feet. This works for hands as well if you want and is not limited to bipeds, the system works just as well for, say, spiders.

High-performance serialization

Extremely compact serialization system. You can save/load your scenes from files. This serialization system supports format changes, so as you develop your game - old saves will be supported and the system will automatically upgrade them to the most recent version, so the player doesn't have to lose any data.

Achievements

Achievements work with Blackboard components and are very easy to define. There is an abstraction system that helps connect your achievements to various platforms such as Steam or XBox (you'd have to implement that binding yourself though), by default it comes with a browser backend, storing data in IndexedDB. I also have bindings for Steam and NewGrounds that I can share.

UI system

You're free to use it or not, the engine works just fine without it. The system is written for speed, and it offers a few commonly used tools, such as popup windows, notifications and pages. The UI system is optimized for speed, so it generates no garbage, but again - if you want to use, say React - you can ignore this system or integrate it with the system.