February 2024 Newsletter

Odin is on the journey to 1.0! You can read up on all changes in the monthly release notes.

Reddit

Karl Zylinski opened up a reddit again! Check it out here Reddit. Personally I’ve left reddit but building up communities other than discord is good. The same applies to searching for odin help online.

Games

We’ve got a whopping 3 Games this month! I’m very excited to show them off here, so please check them out.

Solar Storm from Jakub

“Solar Storm steam page is live! It’s still fairly work-in-progress, the screenshots are outdated and there is no trailer, but I’m working on it! Wishlists are greatly appereciated!!”

Also I’m also doing a first public playtest this weekend, if anyone is interested, join solar storm discord server to participate: https://discord.com/invite/wn5jMMMYe4

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2754920/Solar_Storm/

The Legend of Ján Ïtor from Colin Bellino

“Adventurers are spreading a lot of slime and other mess in the dungeon and you are the one tasked to clean it up before it becomes out of hand.

This game was created over a period of 2 weeks by a team of 3 people, this is a submission for the Pirate Game Jam 14.

Engine: This game was developed as an experiment and way of dog-fooding a custom, handmade game engine i am working on (written in the Odin language).”

CAT & ONION from karl_zylinski

“My game CAT & ONION is now released on itch! https://zylinski.itch.io/cat-and-onion

It’s a warm adventure game where you play as a cat who goes on a surreal lil journey 🐱

It has taken me months to make and I’m very proud to have finished a game all by myself. It is written in Odin + Raylib.

When you buy on itch you also get a drop of the source code. It’s quite a chaotic code base, full of both good and bad things. The good parts is in my opinion the editor tools and the hot reloading etc. The bad parts is the entity system and the physics.”

Community Contributions

Dynlib Helpers by Jeroen

Useful new helper added to core:dynlib to automagically populate a struct with procedure and global pointers from a DLL (or other shared lib depending on platform).

package example

import "core:dynlib"
import "core:fmt"

Symbols :: struct {
    // `foo_` is prefixed, so we look for the symbol `foo_add`.
    add: proc "c" (int, int) -> int,
    // We use the tag here to override the symbol to look for, namely `bar_sub`.
    sub: proc "c" (int, int) -> int `dynlib:"bar_sub"`,

    // Exported global (if exporting an i32, the type must be ^i32 because the symbol is a pointer to the export.)
    // If it's not a pointer or procedure type, we'll skip the struct field.
    hellope: ^i32,

    // Handle to free library.
    // We can have more than one of these so we can match symbols for more than one DLL with one struct.
    _my_lib_handle: dynlib.Library,
}

main :: proc() {
    sym: Symbols

    // Load symbols from `lib.dll` into Symbols struct.
    // Each struct field is prefixed with `foo_` before lookup in the DLL's symbol table.
    // The library's Handle (to unload) will be stored in `sym._my_lib_handle`. This way you can load multiple DLLs in one struct.
    count, ok := dynlib.initialize_symbols(&sym, "lib.dll", "foo_", "_my_lib_handle")
    defer dynlib.unload_library(sym._my_lib_handle)
    fmt.printf("ok: %v. %v symbols loaded from lib.dll (%p).\n", ok, count, sym._my_lib_handle)

    if count > 0 {
        fmt.println("42 + 42 =", sym.add(42, 42))
        fmt.println("84 - 13 =", sym.sub(84, 13))
        fmt.println("hellope =", sym.hellope^)
    }
}

Output

Creating library W:\Odin\core\dynlib\example\lib.lib and object W:\Odin\core\dynlib\example\lib.exp
ok: true. 3 symbols loaded from lib.dll (7FFDCF510000).
42 + 42 = 84
84 - 13 = 71
hellope = 42

Odin / WASM / Webgl by thetarnav

“I’ve been slowly getting into learning Odin, WASM and WebGL So I made a example project where I experiment with the three (and some js tooling for development/bundling) Maybe it could be useful for somebody for reference or as a template Also the wasm/js bindings there are rewritten into modules with types so it’s a bit easier to understand and extend them (no more random typos)”

Check it out here: https://thetarnav.github.io/odin-wasm

Community Showcase

Repositories:

• red_black_tree - simple red black tree implementation
• odin-libpcap - libpcap bindings
• odin-libktx - libktx bindings
• odin-box2d - Box2D 3.0 bindings
• efsw-odin - ESFW bindings
• ogmo-loader - Ogmo Project and - Level Loader
• wcwidth - A simple implementation of wcwidth(3) and wcswidth(3)
• odin-box2c - Quick Box2c bindings
• odin-pkg - command line handling package

Gists:

• blas_bindings - BLAS Bindings for Odin
• sign_extension - Little sign-extension and zero-extension helpers

Miscellaneous

My x86 disassembler disassembling itself. Sheesh now im realizing how long the SSE instructions really are - flysand

Finally, got raylib running on the web - Christhofer

got a simple http server reading requests - fridge777

Its a mess but Hello world Jolt running in Odin. Bindings still have a looong way to go though. - Sumofat

Game Development

Initial POC of Odin in Unity 😉 (DOTS is really making this easy :P) - Dani

Still a spinning Unity Cube, but more stuff has been moved to odin (SystemState, EntityQueries & ComponentHandle usage.. also, dynamic dll loading) - Dani

Source

Odin+SDL+GOL - Glennwiz

Graphics

Got my GPU driven animations to work. Basically doing all the computation and blending on the compute shader. The cpu just finds the animations frames indices and calculates the weight and are then sent to the gpu - Draoz

Got my first working build of odin bindings for the Spine-c runtime (with raylib)! - Zealous

After some struggles, I got working Tilengine bindings in Odin! 🥳 - Akuspel

Back at it again fighting with my voxel engine, first pass at getting light sources to work done - Chris

not super fancy, but I drew a fish with the gpu, loaded from a .obj file. This is my first gpu project that isn't secretly a software renderer - Stvff

crudely animating my fish programmatically - Stvff

Tools & UI

Been getting quite annoyed with the sluggish windows file explorer recently... - Francis_the_cat