EmilandClaude Sonnet 5 d7fcc20f5e M3: Play/Stop — Engine.Host stops ticking Stage.Update outside Play mode
IPlayModeController (Engine.Editor.Contracts) wraps IWorld.Snapshot()/
Restore() as EnterPlay/ExitPlay — the entire mechanism is that one
snapshot, per Snapshot's own doc comment. Exposed as a service, not just
something engine.editor's UI calls directly, so a future non-UI driver
(a test harness, a headless "play for N frames" CLI command) can drive
Play mode without depending on ImGui.

Engine.Host now looks up IPlayModeController once and checks IsPlaying
every frame before running Stage.Update: Edit mode still renders the
scene (so the view isn't frozen and the editor UI stays responsive) but
never ticks it, same distinction Unity draws between its Scene and Game
views. A project with no engine.editor loaded sees no behavior change —
Update runs unconditionally, same as before this existed.

Added "play"/"stop" as stdin commands alongside the existing "r" and
"screenshot", both real controls (not just test scaffolding) for driving
Play mode without a mouse — which is also how this got verified: an
interactive run sent "play", screenshotted, sent "stop", and the log
shows "Entered Play mode in 13.2ms", the real editor path exercising the
same under-100ms budget WorldSnapshotTests already proves at the kernel
level. The Lingua Editor panel's button/label flip Play/(Edit mode) to
Stop/(Playing) correctly across both screenshots.

Also fixes a real layout bug hit while verifying this: SetNextWindowPos
with ImGuiCond.FirstUseEver only applies with no prior imgui.ini entry
for that window title, and this project had already accumulated one from
earlier runs (all three panels stacked exactly on top of each other) —
gave each panel its own default position and .gitignore'd imgui.ini,
which is per-machine session state, not source.

Full suite still green: 65 tests.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N1qPfzq8TDCUMFMV3UwV5N
2026-09-02 16:26:23 +03:00

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 (M0M4) 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.

License

MIT

S
Description
A modular, plugin-first game engine: a small frozen kernel that is a shared language, everything else — including the editor — a plugin.
Readme MIT
1.9 MiB
Languages
C# 93.6%
C 4.5%
Shell 1.2%
CMake 0.7%