Giving users more access to the programming side of the game development More students are learning about the world of open source through video games. Open source games like FreeCiv and Minetest invite young gamers to dig into the source code, while projects like SpigotMC empower them to write plugins to extend their favorite games. Unfortunately, the open source tools used to build games do not share the same prominence. Rochester Institute of Technology student Matt Guerrette hopes to help change that with Hatchit, his open source gaming engine. Guerrette and fellow student Arsen Tufankjian created Hatchit in February 2016. They felt the popular game engines they used in class and for personal projects were more design-oriented and lacked some technical details they were looking for. Together, they decided to build their own gaming engine with the goal of exposing developers to the technical side of the process. "We want to give you more access to the programming side of the game engine," Guerrette said. Hatchit is written in C/C++ and licensed in a mix of GPL and LGPL. The project was originally designed to take advantage of the DirectX APIs for development. However, Guerrette and Tufankjian ran into an unexpected event while they were getting started. Nvidia released the Vulkan APIs in competition with the DirectX APIs. They attempted to support both APIs simultaneously, but later opted to focus on Vulkan. See http://ift.tt/2eyFtie
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