Axmol Engine Documentation

OpenAL Soft is an LGPL-licensed, cross-platform, software implementation of the OpenAL 3D audio API. It provides capabilities for playing audio in a virtual 3D environment, including:

• 3D Audio Features: Distance attenuation, doppler shift, and directional sound emitters.
• EFX Extension: Advanced effects such as air absorption, occlusion, and environmental reverb.
• Audio Management: Streaming audio, multi-channel buffers, and audio capture.

xsxml is an embedded XML SAX (Simple API for XML) parser used within the Axmol engine. It is a hybrid implementation that combines elements from two different parsers:

• The XML SAX parser logic is extracted from the rapidxml DOM parser.
• The non-recursive revision logic is extracted from the pugixml DOM parser.

ntcvt is a collection of helper utilities designed for Windows NT encoding conversions. It provides optimized alternatives to standard C++11 std::codecvt by leveraging the native Win32 API. Its primary purposes are:

• Performance: Utilizing native Win32 APIs which are faster than std::codecvt.
• Ease of Use: Simplifying conversions between UTF-8, UTF-16, and MBCS (Multi-Byte Character Set) within the NT kernel/system context.
• Buffer Optimization: Implementing a hack to avoid the overhead of loop-filling \0 when preallocating buffers for std::wstring.

FastLZ is an ANSI C/C90 implementation of the Lempel-Ziv 77 (LZ77) lossless data compression algorithm. It is optimized for extremely high compression and decompression speeds at the expense of a lower compression ratio compared to algorithms like zlib.

Best Use Cases:

• Series of text or paragraphs.
• Sequences of raw pixel data.
• Any blocks of data containing significant repetition.

When NOT to use:

• Do not use on data that is already compressed (e.g., images, videos, or other compressed file formats).

Axmol uses HLSL as its primary shader source language. To ensure cross-platform compatibility across D3D11, D3D12, Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL 3.3, and OpenGL ES 3.x, shaders must follow a specific subset of HLSL 2021 syntax.

Key Rules:

• No Manual Registers: Do not use : register(...) annotations for textures, samplers, or constant buffers. The axslcc compiler assigns deterministic backend bindings automatically.
• Semantic Matching: Vertex inputs are matched by semantic name and index (e.g., POSITION, TEXCOORD0), not by variable name.
• Entry Point: Use main as the entry point for all shader stages.
• Resource Declaration: Declare textures and buffers by name and type only.

The axmol-cmdline tool is a command-line utility designed to handle the full lifecycle of an Axmol game, including project creation, running, publishing, and debugging. It operates via a plugin-based architecture where the main command invokes specific plugins for different tasks.

# starts a new project called "My Game" for multi-platform
$ axmol new MyGame -l cpp -p dev.axmol.mygame

$ cd MyGame

# Will deploy the project to device and run it
$ axmol run -p android