LEGE - The Lower Elements Game Engine
LEGE is a free software, open source game engine for building audio games. Its goals, in order, are to be:
Under Active and Early Development
This software is under active development and is in an early state. Everything described in this readme is aspirational, and not necessarily representative of LEGE as it stands today. If you'd like to help, we love getting pull requests.
Easy to Use
LEGE uses the Lua programming language: "a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language." It is easy to get started building LEGE games, even if you're quite new to programming. The knowledge you gain writing LEGE applications in Lua can also be used to write standalone Lua applications, and we embrace and promote Lua best practices and existing convensions.
Cross Platform
LEGE leverages well established, portable C libraries including SDL for input and rendering, and OpenAL (specifically OpenAL Soft) for high quality, 3 dimensional audio. It is compatible with all major desktop OS platforms: Windows, macOS, Linux, *BSD, etc. I also plan to put effort into making LEGE work on mobile devices where possible, such as on Android and iOS. Audio gaming should be accessible to all!
Distributing a LEGE project is as easy as running lege dist, and publishing the built distribution (.zip / .exe
installer on Windows, .app / .dmg on macOS, Flatpak / Snap / Deb / whatever package format you choose on Linux).
Powerful and Extensible
LEGE is designed to be highly extensible, offering the flexibility to use existing Lua or C modules, as well as third-party providers for additional engine functionalities like map loading, networking, game chat, and updates. You can even create your own modules to enhance the engine's capabilities.
Want to use the Discord SDK in your game? It's as easy as:
lege package add discord-sdk
-- file: init.lua local discord = require "discord-sdk"
Blazing Fast!
LEGE utilizes LuaJIT by default, which employs just-in-time compilation to translate Lua code into native machine code, resulting in performance nearly on par with C. The core engine is written in C to ensure optimal performance. Our aim is to strike the perfect balance between speed and ease of use.
Documentation
View the LEGE manual, API documentation, and examples on Github Pages
License
LEGE is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License 3.0:
Copyright (C) 2023 Michael Connor Buchan mikey@blindcomputing.org
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 3 of the License.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library; if not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.