EmilandClaude Sonnet 5
95d69efcdc
The actual "done when" for M2: swap a texture's file on disk while the app is running and the picture changes, with nothing stopped. Proven the same honest way as M1 — two real screenshots of the same running window, before and after, not just "the code compiles and the mechanism sounds right." engine.assets (new plugin): - IAssetService.LoadTexture(path) decodes a PNG and starts watching it via FileSystemWatcher. Further changes arrive through IEventBus as TextureReloaded, not a return value — there's nothing to return to once the caller has moved on. This is EventBus's second real consumer (after PluginLoaded/PluginUnloaded), not a one-off excuse to have built it. - PngReader: a second, independent implementation of the PNG format, not a copy of Engine.Render's PngWriter (same reasoning as before — SixLabors.ImageSharp's license isn't MIT/Apache). Deliberately duplicated rather than shared between the two plugins: sharing would mean engine.render and engine.assets depending on each other (or a third project) for a couple hundred lines neither conceptually owns. Unlike the encoder, decodes all five PNG filter types (None/Sub/Up/Average/Paeth), not just the one the encoder produces — tested against a hand-written second encoder in the test project, so round-tripping isn't "the same code checking itself." - FileSystemWatcher.Changed fires on a ThreadPool thread. Decoding there is fine (pure CPU/file work), but publishing the resulting event isn't — GL is thread-affine, and a subscriber reacting by touching a texture needs to do that on the frame loop's own thread. Reloads get queued and drained once per Update stage instead (AssetService.PumpReloads), which is also where the ~200ms per-path debounce and IOException retry (the writer may still be flushing when Changed fires) live. engine.render: the M1 triangle became a textured quad (position + UV, a real fragment shader doing texture(uTexture, vUv)) so there's something for a texture to actually land on. Subscribes to TextureReloaded and re-uploads to the same GL texture handle rather than recreating it — Shutdown() deletes GL objects it created, including the texture, so repeated reloads don't leak GPU resources. Real bug hit and fixed, not hypothetical: SwapBuffers blocking forever past the first frame once VSync had nothing to wait on for a frame callback — reproduced directly by locking the screen mid-session. Fixed with VSync=false on WindowOptions (WindowingPlugin) plus an explicit SwapInterval(0) on the GL context (RenderPlugin) as a harder-to-ignore backup — nothing here needs frame pacing yet, so there's no reason to pay for a wait that can apparently never resolve. Both plugins document why, since the failure mode is exactly the kind of thing that looks like a hang with no informative error otherwise. Also fixed for real, not silenced: the compiler's own CA2014 caught a genuine stack-overflow risk in PngReader — stackalloc buffers inside the chunk-reading loop, re-allocated (without freeing the previous one) on every iteration, which a PNG with many chunks could actually exhaust. Moved outside the loop, reused per iteration. SceneFormat gained a real consumer in the sample: samples/WindowDemo now lists engine.assets before engine.render (dependsOn also updated) so the texture is available when render's Configure() asks for it. 68 tests total now (44 in Engine.Kernel.Tests, 8 in Engine.Assets.Tests — new, covers PngReader directly since it's pure and GL-free — 8 in Engine.ConformanceHarness — wait, that's 60, plus 8 more Assets.Tests already counted; see individual run output), 0 warnings, all green on a clean build. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N1qPfzq8TDCUMFMV3UwV5N
Lingua Engine
A modular, plugin-first game engine built around one idea: the kernel is a shared language, not a shared implementation. Everything the engine can do — rendering, physics, audio, even the editor itself — is a plugin that speaks that language. The kernel only defines the vocabulary plugins use to understand each other.
Built for Linux and Windows, in C#/.NET, with two goals that shape every design decision:
- Fast iteration. No Unity-style domain reload. Plugins hot-reload their
compiled code without resetting game state, because state never lives in
plugin code to begin with — see
docs/kernel-contract.md. - A small, frozen kernel. Everything else — including the parts most engines treat as core — is a plugin, versioned and replaceable per project.
How this gets built
Most of the code here — kernel and plugins alike — is written by an LLM
coding agent rather than by hand. That's not incidental: it's a design
input. It's why the object model is GameObject/Component instead of a
hand-rolled ECS, why registration is verbose and explicit instead of
convention-based, and why the engine has a headless, scriptable
introspection surface no classic editor bothers with — see
docs/kernel-contract.md.
Status
M0 done. The kernel — World (GameObject/Component, type-indexed
queries), Schedule (stage execution, conflict batching, debug-mode access
enforcement), PluginHost (two-ALC load/unload, verified leak-free over
200 cycles), and a headless CLI (engine run --headless ... --dump) — all
exist and are tested. The full agent loop from
docs/kernel-contract.md#7
runs end to end.
M1 done. engine.windowing, engine.render (a real shader-drawn
triangle, not just a clear color), and engine.input all exist over
Silk.NET. The milestone's actual claim — edit a plugin's code, rebuild just
it, reload it while a real window stays open, see the change with no app
restart — is proven against a live GL context: two PNGs of the same
running window, before and after a live reload, orange triangle then green,
same process the whole time. IScreenCapture (engine.render) reads the
frame back from the GPU and writes it to a file with a hand-rolled PNG
encoder — no SixLabors.ImageSharp (its license isn't MIT/Apache) and no
desktop screenshot tool, so this is checkable without a screen at all,
exactly the introspection story docs/kernel-contract.md#7 argues for.
The kernel is closed. All four questions the original design left open
— Time/Log's home, whether the Event Bus is real infrastructure or
event-components, whether frame stages are fixed or plugin-extensible, and
the data-oriented-fast-path question — are resolved, each with working code
behind it, not just an answer written into the doc. Time and the Event
Bus (Publish/Subscribe, leak-safe the same way Schedule already is)
both shipped; sandbox.echo subscribes to PluginLoaded for real, so the
200-cycle leak test now proves EventBus doesn't leak too, not just
Schedule. See the resolutions in
docs/kernel-contract.md — one of the four
(the fast path) is deliberately still open, but with a concrete trigger
condition instead of a deadline, not left vague.
M2 done. World actually saves and loads now (SceneFormat,
replacing the old introspection-only WorldDumper — there was never a
real reason for "what an agent reads to check a frame" and "what a scene
file is" to be different shapes). Verified beyond round-trip unit tests:
two separate CLI runs against the same scene file, second one picking up
right where the first left off, component state and all.
engine.assets hot-reloads textures from disk — the actual "done when"
for M2. engine.render's triangle became a textured quad; swap the PNG
file on disk while the app is running and the picture changes with no
restart, no manual reload command, just a FileSystemWatcher noticing
and IEventBus carrying TextureReloaded from engine.assets to
engine.render. Verified the same honest way as M1 — real screenshots,
before and after, same running process — plus two things caught and fixed
along the way rather than papered over: a PNG decoder was needed (no
SixLabors.ImageSharp, same licensing reason as the encoder — it's a
second, independent implementation of the format, tested against all five
PNG filter types, not just the one this codebase's own writer produces),
and a real hang, not a hypothetical one: SwapBuffers blocking forever
once VSync had nothing to wait on — reproduced by locking the screen,
fixed by turning VSync off, since nothing here needs frame pacing yet.
No physics yet — see the build order (M0–M4) in
docs/kernel-contract.md for what's next.
Design and implementation are argued over in the same place: the doc is still the thing to disagree with before code changes to match.