Scarce

Are you sick and tired of game engines wasting precious memory? Do you feel like you can't stand realistic graphics anymore? Do you absolutely hate memory safety in any way, shape, or form? Look no further.

Scarce is a suite of "tools" to help you develop "games" using an arbitrarily low amount of RSS memory. This repository has a testbed application if you're interested in its available features, but no documentation has been written so far. Stack allocations aside, the application can only access and modify the contents of a pre-allocated chunk of memory.

Scarce also provides a screen with an instanced text renderer and some useful memory management tools.

Warning

This project is currently only available on Linux. The Windows binaries are incomplete, even though the engine provides a GLFW windowing system. I will implement it in the near future, but it is not a priority right now. I have no plans to support any other platforms.

Purpose

Memory is a precious asset that programmers have started taking for granted lately.

But, with RAM prices through the roof, I have decided to challenge myself by making an open world game that uses so little memory that a computer from the 90s would have no trouble running it. In fact, you could write a graphics layer to support OpenGL 1.1, slap a Windows 98 windowing system, and voilá.

That's the sole purpose of this game engine.

At the time of writing, the testbed application size is sitting at aroung 1 KiB, and the total resident memory used is around 26 MiB (Fedora 43 Plasma), or around 30 MiB (Fedora 43 Plasma X11), with a few extra megabytes when using the GLFW windowing system. The entire game runs on a 1KiB memory chunk.

Although the game application is restricted to a predetermined memory region, using the stack and other memory regions is allowed, though I am doing my best to keep that usage to a minimum whenever possible.

Getting Started

As is the case with all my previous projects, no prebuilt binaries have been released at the time of writing. If you want to use it, you'll need to build it yourself (sorry). At least this time a template repository is available.

The latest version of this project has only been tested on Fedora Linux 43 (KDE Plasma Edition) with both X11 and Wayland, using GLFW and the native X11 windowing systems.

Prerequisites

If you actually want to build this thing, you are going to need:

• Meson
• A GPU with OpenGL 4.6 support
• Mesa drivers

Debian:

sudo apt install libgl1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dri mesa-utils

Red Hat:

sudo dnf install mesa-libGL mesa-libGL-devel libx11-dev

Installation

1. Clone the repository

   git clone https://github.com/dat-alpaca/scarce

   
   

2. Setup the project The only options available are BUILD_LOADER, BUILD_TESTBED, and USE_NATIVE_WINDOWING. They should be pretty self-explanatory. The engine library (or core features) is always generated.

   ./scripts/setup
   ./scripts/configure

3. Install the project

   ./scripts/install

   After installation, you should have a working copy under deploy/. It should contain a copy of the assets folder, the scarce loader executable (scarce), and the testbed application stripped binary.

4. Run You can use the following command to run the application located in deploy/.

   ./scripts/run

   This will generate a premade config.ini file that you can modify. The fields should (hopefully) be easy enough to understand.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.