Engine development

The current implementation of ChatImproVR's engine is chatimprovr. It's assumed that you've read the previous sections, and understand how to write plugins for ChatImproVR.

ChatImproVR is split into a few different parts. The Engine is the core of a ChatImproVR Host. It is responsible for managing the ECS, facilitating pub/sub messaging, and loading plugin code. The engine contains no code responsible for interacting with the outside world; it has no networking cabablity nor does it render scenes or take user input. That is the responsibility of the rest of the Host's code.

The Client contains a number of subsystems which allow the Engine to interact with the user:

• desktop: All interfacing with desktop platforms; keyboard and mouse input. Contains the desktop mainloop
• vr: All interfacing with virtual reality platforms; controller and headset motion. Contains the VR mainloop
• ui: Simple GUI for use from within plugins
• render: Putting meshes on the screen, assigning shaders, etc.

Each of these subsystems interacts with the Engine by making ECS queries and checking the message Inboxes that they've subscribed to. In this way, creating subsystems is very much like writing plugins.

The Server is a lot simpler, except that it may connect to many Clients and is intended to be a headless program. It has a few simple subsystems which e.g. report which clients are connected.