In my spare time I develop a game engine. The project started when I was in high school and has helped me to become the developer I am today. The engine has changed drastically from its beginnings and is getting close to a state where I would like to release it. Written entirely in C#, Spectrum provides a graphics engine, physics engine, a peer-to-peer networking service and an entity management system. Spectrum is entirely open source, and will soon be free to use.

Example

Defense Contract is still in a very early version with place holder graphics. The core features of the engine: graphics, networking, and physics can be seen in this simple example.

Features

Spectrum provides some core components of 3D games.

Game Objects

Some of the hardest tasks in 3D game developement are introduced when creating the simplest unit of the game, a game object. Game objects require 3D graphics and physics two things that Monogame does not directly supply. Spectrum implements extensible game objects, and does some of the hard work for developers.

Networking

Physics and graphics are pretty standard in game engines, but Spectrum offers a networking service like no other engine or game before it. Peer-to-peer networking comes with certain challenges, but it gives game developers the power to connect their game’s players in new and interesting ways.

Content

Monogame provides a rather clunky content importing pipeline which Spectrum does support. However, Spectrum provides cleaner layers on top of Monogame’s content importing, allowing developers to specify custom content importing techniques for certain files.

Models and Animation

The content feature is important for certain things like 3D models with animations, something which is very difficult to import using Monogame. Spectrum provides its own 3D model and animation importer that work with the g3dj filetype. Converters exist for most common model types, .fbx .obj and so on. Blender even has plugins that allow exporting g3dj files directly.

Steam

Spectrum comes fully integrated with Steam. For most developers this integration is a small task, but for networked games, especially peer-to-peer games, it can become rather complicated. Spectrum also fully utilizes the peer-to-peer networking that Steam provides.