WaveEngine

This project is a custom 2D game engine written in C++ 17, using SDL2 for cross-platform windowing, input, and system abstraction.

Phases

The phases are intentionally ordered to mirror how a real engine is grown in practice: each system is introduced only after the assumptions it depends on are stable and observable. Early phases prioritize determinism, visibility, and instrumentation over abstraction. Rendering, movement, camera behavior, streaming, and collision are all proven independently before any higher-level entity or gameplay architecture is layered on top. This allows each phase to serve as both a learning artifact and a reusable reference implementation, while keeping performance characteristics and failure modes easy to reason about. Later phases will focus on integrating these proven systems into cohesive gameplay, improving “game feel,” and introducing editor tooling and lightweight ECS patterns without retrofitting foundational decisions.

Phase 00 — Engine Bootstrap

Goal: Validate the foundation: window, renderer, asset loading.

• SDL2 window creation (high-DPI)
• Minimal render loop
• Texture loading from shared assets/

▶ See: projects/phase_00_engine_bootstrap/README.md

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Phase 01 — Tilemap Rendering

Goal: Load and render a real Tiled map with a 32×32 atlas.

• Load a Tiled JSON map from disk (assets/tiles/ww-16k.json)
• Decode base64 + zlib tile layers
• Render a 32×32 atlas (assets/tiles/16k-waves-trans-atlas.png) using SDL2

▶ See: projects/phase_01_tilemap_rendering/README.md

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Phase 02 — Player Movement

Goal: Introduce a controllable player entity using simple, deterministic movement.

• Render a player boat sprite (assets/boat-64.png) on top of the tilemap
• Frame-rate–independent movement using std::chrono
• WSAD keyboard controls with normalized diagonal movement
• Shared world → screen transform with the tilemap
• No acceleration or physics yet (intentionally deferred)

▶ See: projects/phase_02_player_movement/README.md

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Phase 03 — Camera Follow

Goal: Introduce a smooth, player-centric camera system with inertial movement.

• Camera follows the player boat with configurable smoothing
• Exponential interpolation (lerp) for natural camera inertia
• Optional follow toggle for debugging and comparison
• Camera deadzone to delay movement until the player drifts from center
• Frame-rate–independent camera updates
• FPS counter added to establish a performance baseline before chunking
• Uses the full island tilemap (ww-16k-all-islands.json) to stress test rendering

▶ See: projects/phase_03_camera_follow/README.md

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Phase 04 — Level Streaming

Goal: Prove scalable world rendering through chunk-based visibility, ordering, and measurement.

• World partitioned into logical chunks derived from precomputed island data (chunk_non_empty)
• Active chunk selection driven by camera position and configurable radius
• Deterministic render order: water background → island chunks → player
• On-demand chunk loading with an in-memory cache (no eviction yet; intentionally simple)
• Ocean rendered as a constant background to avoid empty-chunk overhead
• Visual chunk bounds overlay for validation and debugging
• Runtime toggles for culling, streaming radius, and debug visualization
• Chunk files live in assets/tiles/chunk_non_empty and encode world origin in filenames (e.g. island_chunk_0_0_-8000_-8000)

Performance & Instrumentation

• Frame timing and FPS measurement integrated into the main loop

• Live stats surfaced in the window title (active chunks, loaded chunks, tiles/frame)

• CSV telemetry logging with timestamps:

  • Player world position
  • FPS and frame time
  • Active vs loaded chunk counts
  • Chunk load events and radius changes

• Screenshot capture embeds runtime stats directly into the image for documentation

CSV output: assets/profiles/phase_04_level_streaming.csv

▶ See: projects/phase_04_level_streaming/README.md

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Phase 05 — Collision Detection

Goal: Prove shoreline collision masks derived from island chunks.

• Build collision masks from shore tiles in island chunk maps
• Per-frame boat collision query (read-only; no response yet)
• Debug overlay to visualize collision cells aligned to the world

▶ See: projects/phase_05_collision_detection/README.md

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