# Monthly Update on a Haskell Game Engine

DevFeed: [Monthly Update on a Haskell Game Engine](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/monthly-update-on-a-haskell-game-engine-27910.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2023-01-01-monthly-update-on-a-haskell-game-engine.html>)

Published: 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Romes' Musings](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/romes-musings.md>)

Topics: [Haskell](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/haskell.md>), [Game engine](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/game-engine.md>), [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>), [shaders](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/shaders.md>), [glsl](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/glsl.md>), [Graphics](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/graphics.md>)

Tags: [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [haskell](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/haskell.md>), [programming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming.md>), [render](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/render.md>), [shaders](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/shaders.md>), [technical](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/technical.md>), [vulkan](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/vulkan.md>)

## AI overview

A monthly development update on Ghengin, an unreleased Haskell game engine. It describes a procedural-planets demo and outlines the engine's Vulkan renderer, FIR shaders embedded in Haskell, entity management, scene graph, render queue, and supporting libraries.

## Source excerpt

Contents 1 Ghengin 1.1 Bullets on Technical Details 1.2 The Small Victories 1.3 A peek into the code 1 Ghengin I've been working the past month or two in a game engine titled Ghengin (pronounced /ɡɛn-ʤɪn/, never /ɡɛn-ɡɪn/). This is not yet a release, and version 0.1.0 is far into the future. However, I've come a long way and I'd like to share a few pictures of my progress. This post was migrated from the discussion at the Haskell Discourse The demo I've been working on is based on Sebastian Lague's series Procedural Planets. It is a showcase of procedurally generated planets you can move around in and tweak the procedural generation parameters of the planets to create oceans and continents. Fig 1. Screenshot of planets demo 1.1 Bullets on Technical Details I hope to, soon enough, write a more substantial explanation of the engine's technical challenges and overall design decisions so far, and on the game developer's facing side of the engine. In the meantime, here are a few key points regarding the technical feats of the engine along with the main libraries it currently depends on, which help create a picture of how it is working: The renderer is written using the great bindings to the Vulkan API The shaders are crucial in the overall design, and a lot of code depends on their definition (e.g. preparing render pipelines, allocating descriptor sets and textures, everything materials related ...). The shaders are written using FIR, an amazing shader language embedded in Haskell! The entity management, scene graph and render queue are done/created through the apecs entity component system. Vectors and matrices are from geomancy GLFW-b for window management and user input (used as the window backend for vulkan) The dear-imgui bindings for the GUI JuicyPixels for loading textures FIR is a really cool shader library and unlike any you've likely tried before (it's embeded in Haskell, but that's just the start). The shader's "interfaces" are defined at the type level, and in