FLAW Engine

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FLAW is a highly experimental open source game engine written in Haskell.

Motivation

FLAW is heavily based on my experiences from developing Inanity engine. In short, the experiences are: C++ sucks, game development can be done better. It's time to discover new horizons by using Haskell in the area where it hasn't been used a lot (yet).

This project is mostly a playground for absolutely crazy ideas. Surely if someone managed to make a real game out of it, that game would be absolutely crazy too!

Building

FLAW uses stack for building. Note the assumption is that the project is to be built with integer-simple GHC, to be more commercial-friendly due to concerns about LGPL license of GMP library used by stock GHC (especially on Windows where GHC does not support dynamic linking of GMP). See stack.yaml, which refers to integer-simple-snapshot.yaml containing appropriate adjustments to some packages. If you don't have integer-simple GHC, or don't care about GMP, simply set resolver field in stack.yaml to desired snapshot directly and remove ghc-variant: integersimple.

Binaries

Some binaries (built from CI) are available on FLAW itch.io page.

What works

• Platform support: Windows, Linux, macOS, web (via GHCJS)
• Abstracted graphics API: DirectX 11, OpenGL, WebGL
• Abstracted inline shaders in Haskell, with HLSL and GLSL backends
• TH-generated math library, with efficient unboxed fixed-length vectors/matrices
• TH-based game build, type-safe game assets
• Low-level user input library (via Raw Input on Windows, SDL on Linux and macOS, browser DOM APIs on Web)
• Simple windowing API
• Fast text rendering with subpixel anti-aliasing
• Collada import (rigid and skinned geometries, animations)
• Basic physics (integration with Bullet physics engine)

In progress

• Visual effects (deferred rendering, materials, lighting, shadowing, etc)
• High-level GUI framework made from scratch (i.e. neither using native GUIs nor frameworks like Qt)
• Real-time collaborative asset editor
• Type-safe multiplayer framework

Experiments

• TH-based Lua-to-Haskell compiler.

Plans

• TH-generated bindings for scripting languages
• Vulkan support

Packages and platform support

Linux is the primary development platform. It also considered the only "server" platform, hence several "server" packages are tested only on Linux, although it's probably possible to compile and run them on Windows or macOS.

Here are all packages in A-Z order. Checkmark against a platform means that the package is being actually built and tested (if it has tests :D) on this platform during CI.