EmilandClaude Sonnet 5 dcadc57061 M4: engine.audio — miniaudio, same narrow-shim shape as engine.physics
native/audio-native/lingua_audio.c wraps miniaudio (vendored at pinned
release 0.11.25 — dual public domain/MIT-0, confirmed from the license
statement in the file itself) the same way lingua_physics.c wraps Box3D:
ma_engine_config/ma_sound_config are large structs with optional
callbacks, so nothing but plain int/float/bool/UTF-8-path scalars crosses
the P/Invoke boundary, and handles are this shim's own array-index
handles into a fixed ma_sound table, not miniaudio's own pointer types.
Same DllImport-not-LibraryImport choice too, for the same reason: zero
AllowUnsafeBlocks needed anywhere in this plugin.

One real addition beyond mirroring the physics shim: Lingua_Audio_Init
takes a useNullBackend flag. miniaudio's null backend runs the exact same
load/decode/mix/loop pipeline against a device that discards its output —
real coverage of this shim's logic without depending on real audio
hardware being present (most CI runners have none) or making an
automated test run produce actual sound, which nobody expects. Real
gameplay (AudioPlugin) always requests the real backend; only
Engine.Audio.Tests asks for the null one.

engine.audio adds an AudioSource component (ClipPath/Volume/Loop/
PlayOnAwake) and AudioWorld, which — same shape as PhysicsWorld, same
reason: no destruction event exists to hook — diffs Query<AudioSource>()
against its own tracked set every Stage.Update, loading a clip the first
time it sees one, applying Volume/Loop changes only when they actually
changed, and unloading sounds whose GameObject is gone. IAudioService
exposes Play/Stop/IsPlaying for gameplay code to trigger a sound instead
of it only ever firing on PlayOnAwake.

5 new tests, all against the null backend, all passed after fixing one
real bug they caught: AudioWorld originally re-attempted loading (and
re-warned about) a missing clip on every single Sync call instead of
once — MissingClip_WarnsAndDoesNotThrow failed on the first run with 2
warnings instead of 1, fixed by tracking failed-load GameObjects the same
way PhysicsWorld already tracks missing-collider ones.

Full suite: 86 tests. Not yet verified: actual audible playback through a
real device — the null-backend tests prove this plugin's own logic, but
nobody has listened to real output yet. Worth doing deliberately, not as
a surprise mid-session — flagging rather than just doing it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01N1qPfzq8TDCUMFMV3UwV5N
2026-09-02 17:13:21 +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.

M3 done. The editor is engine.editor, a plugin like any other — no special-cased editor layer in the kernel. An ImGui overlay (Silk.NET.OpenGL. Extensions.ImGui) draws over the live scene; getting it to actually appear in the same frame (not delayed by one) needed splitting engine.render's old Draw-then-SwapBuffers system in two, so a new Stage.Present could run the swap after every Stage.Render system — this plugin's draw and engine.editor's ImGui pass both — had drawn into the same back buffer. See the "Frame stages" resolution in docs/kernel-contract.md for why adding a stage was still the right call under a "fixed, kernel-defined" rule.

Hierarchy and Inspector both work off reflection, not per-component-type code: HierarchyPanel walks IWorld.Roots directly, InspectorPanel enumerates a selected GameObject's Transform and every attached Component's public fields via FieldInfo, live-editable for int/float/bool/string/Vector3. A brand new component type in any plugin gets an Inspector for free the moment it's attached.

Play/Stop is IWorld.Snapshot()/Restore() — a scene-format dump taken on Enter, restored on Exit — plus Engine.Host skipping Stage.Update outside Play. Nothing here is a domain reload; see docs/kernel-contract.md §5. M3's actual "done when," entering Play in under 100ms, is proven twice: a kernel-level timed test and a real editor run logging 13ms.

The gizmo is a real 3-axis translate handle, not a flat 2D overlay — chosen deliberately over a scoped 2D version specifically so a screen-space drag means something: it projects the selected GameObject's world position through the actual camera's View/Projection and reads the drag back the same way. The underlying math (GizmoMath) has no GL or ImGui dependency and is unit-tested on its own — including the case a screenshot can't easily catch, dragging an object parented under a non-uniformly-scaled parent.

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.
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