Since the beginning of 2023, Russia has been developing the domestic game engine Nau Engine. And today it came to light that it will go into open beta testing in November; before that there were only closed tests.
Nau Engine’s main feature is its openness. Developers will be able to use it completely free thanks to the 3-clause BSD license.
But what is under the hood of this new engine? Nau Engine has a modular architecture and the ability to change subsystems like cubes in a construction set. In the beta version, the main focus is on projects using GameObject – this is a more familiar approach to most developers. However, for advanced users there is also an ECS library borrowed from the Dagor engine. The writing system in Nau Engine is not tied to a specific language. In beta it will be possible to write in C++ and Lua, and this is only the beginning.
Now about the “filling”. To work with content, Nau Engine uses OpenUSD – a kind of Swiss army knife for importing different types of assets. This will make life much easier for developers. The rendering system is based on the Dagor engine and currently supports DX12 for Windows. In terms of physics, the Jolt engine is used here, which allows you to create a realistic interaction of objects. And miniaudio, an open source audio engine, is responsible for the sound.
Nau Engine is also suitable for creating multiplayer games. For this, there is a special game logic reproduction module that works based on GameNetworkingSockets and ASIO libraries. If you are interested in the user interface, the developers decided not to reinvent the wheel and got solutions from the Cocos2dx engine as a base. And for debugging, the popular library Dear ImGui is used.
And finally – about “movements”. The animation system in beta will support both keyframe animations and skeleton animations for characters. The latter are implemented using the ozz-animation library. Game creators are thus able to bring their worlds to life to the fullest.
More information about the engine is available at the connection.
