AssetForge 0.1.2

Building Pipeline for video game assets

Asset Forge

Asset Forge: CMake for video game assets. With this utility, you will be able to preprocess your asset files, which are human and tool-readable/usable, into binary files that can be directly streamed into C/C++ structs and classes. This process will streamline loading complex assets in small video game projects written in C/C++ or other systems languages.

Instead of linking several libraries dedicated to loading different types of files: meshes, animations, sprite sheets, and etc. Now you can just write a simple python script that loads in any complicated mesh/assimp file, optimize the mesh, do some precalculations for vertex normals and tangent vectors, then package it into a binary file that can be easily loaded in C/C++ by streaming the data into a struct or class that has a mirror structure to the binary file.

First define a Amake.py file:

import AssetForge
from amake import atlas, text, compress

from pathlib import Path

AssetForge.RegisterTool(compress.CompressTool(), 3) 
AssetForge.RegisterTool(atlas.AtlasTool(), 2)  
AssetForge.RegisterTool(text.TextTool(), 1)  
AssetForge.RegisterTool(AssetForge.common.General(), 0)  

AssetForge.Build(input_folder=Path("assets"), output_folder=Path("build"), recursive=True, parallel=True)

Then run:

python Amake.py

Note: amake in from amake import atlas, text, compress is a folder of scripts that define the specific instructions for preprocessing .txt, .atlas, and .bin files:

• AtlasTool takes in a .atlas file which is just a json which defines the aabb of sprites in an image in a human readable json format, and outputs a .atlas.bin file which is binary that can be directly loaded into a std::vector of aabbs and a std::unordered_map<std::string, unsigned int> in C++
• CompressTool takes .bin files (like .atlas.bin) and compresses them into .bin.z files
• TextTool just copies all .txt files from input dir to the output dir
• General is a base case which links every other file not captured by the other tools into the output dir from the input dir

The result of python Amake.py:

ls -R input_folder

assets/:
atlases  test.txt

assets/atlases:
atari_8bit_font.atlas  atari_8bit_font.png

python Amake.py
[0%  ] building ... 
[20% ] General "assets/atlases/atari_8bit_font.atlas"
[40% ] TextTool "assets/test.txt"
[60% ] General "assets/atlases/atari_8bit_font.png"
[80% ] AtlasTool "assets/atlases/atari_8bit_font.atlas"
[100%] CompressTool "build/atlases/atari_8bit_font.atlas.bin"

ls -R output_folder

build:
atlases  output.log  test.txt

build/atlases:
atari_8bit_font.atlas (link)  atari_8bit_font.atlas.bin  atari_8bit_font.atlas.bin.z (60% compression) atari_8bit_font.png (link)

check out exp for the full example of this.