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lingua-engine/README.md
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EmilandClaude Sonnet 5 95d69efcdc Close M2: engine.assets hot-reloads textures, no restart needed
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
2026-09-02 05:28:15 +03:00

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# 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`](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`](docs/kernel-contract.md#7-written-by-an-agent-not-a-human).
## 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`](docs/kernel-contract.md#7-written-by-an-agent-not-a-human)
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`](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 (M0M4) in
[`docs/kernel-contract.md`](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.
## License
[MIT](LICENSE)