Awesome

What is this?

quaazar is a scene and 3D engine initially designed for demoscene purposes. However, quaazar will be released as a BSD3 Haskell package at some day.

Brief

quaazar is a work-in-progress Haskell package. It uses OpenGL behing the scene, but will also use Vulkan as it’s released. It’s a continuous effort to be modern and up-to-date. That’s why the initial version of quaazar will be backed-up by OpenGL 4.4 at least – OpenGL 4.5 if drivers get shit done correctly.

How to use it?

Up to now, I strongly don’t recommend to use quaazar yet. It’s not ready for you folks. I’ll write a few articles about it on my blog when it’s ready to be shipped.

However, if you’re tedious and want to get your feet (very) wet, you can clone the git repository, cabal install --only-dependencies and cabal install. It will install the library and a tool called qzr. Consider using qzr init [path] to start a new quaazar project in the current directory. It’ll create a default application with a black window.

The documentation is not on hackage yet since it’s not released, so consider building it when installing quaazar. It’s not complete, but it’s not empty either.

For who?

quaazar will be available on the following platforms:

• Windows
• GNU/Linux
• Mac OSX

About contributions…

Yeah, you might find quaazar pretty cool. If you don’t, tell me in the face. Ahah just kidding, but tell me why you think it sucks in the issues tracker. That’s important to me in order to enhance quaazar and make everyone happy.

quaazar is actually my software baby. In the end, I want everyone to be able to use it. That doesn’t mean I want to give it away. As my property, it’s also my toy, my decisions, my way to picture rendering. Then, I don’t commonly accept pull requests.

However, if you push a PR that fixes a critical issue, I’ll accept it for sure. I’m also open-minded to meta discussions about it. If quaazar gets used by a lot of people at some times, I want everyone to be happy with it. Don’t blame BDFL.

Versions

As new versions get released, backward compatibility and legacy code will follow the Haskell versioning guidelines, that are:

• a patch version number gets incremented when quaazar gets something fixed internally that doesn’t add anything nor break anything ; the changes have no impact on the external part of the library; although performances fixes are considered patches as they don’t change the interface of the library, if performances get greatly improved or reduced, a major or minor version will be released instead ;
• a minor version number gets incremented when quaazar gets changes that don’t break backward compatibility, like adding a new super hot feature ;
• a major version number gets incremented when quaazar has backward compatibility breaking changes ;
• a super-major version number gets incremented when quaazar’s design changes a lot, breaking everything and marking a new era (god that sounds so heroic).

The initial version is 0.1.

Screenshots

quaazar is shipped with default materials, like an enhanced version of the phong lighting model:

It has a nice support of compositing, which can be used to implement nice post-process effects:

quaazar supports an arbitrary number of lights per scene and especially allows the programmer to use as many shadows as they wish. Furthermore, the level of detail of each shadow can be changed dynamically: