Introduction

Welcome to the documentation for ObjectTalk, a object-oriented Swiss Army Knife providing a Scripting Language, 2D/3D Graphics Engine, Node Based Programming, an Entity Component System and an Integrated Development Environment to learn and have some fun. Below is a quick introduction to the ObjectTalk eco system and you can get access to the details using the menubar at the top of this documents.

Full source code can be found in the GitHub repository. Instructions for building and installing ObjectTalk on various platforms can be found in the installation manual. Currently, instructions are available for MacOS, Linux and Windows.

Background

Late 2020, I retired after a 40+ year career in the software and system development business. Starting as a programmer/analyst and later moving up the ladder to management, international standardization and geopolitics, I was exposed to lots of technologies including operating system design, computer language development, military command and control systems, web application design, data science and what we now call artificial intelligence. You can read my full bio on my website.

After retirement, I dusted off some old projects to improve mental health (applying the "use it or loss it" principle like we do for physical health) and that's how this repository came about. I started by revisiting a scripting language I wrote decades ago, modernizing it and learning things along the way. Once the language was stable, it needed a few use cases and I dusted off some 2D/3D graphic projects that I had laying around. This then led to including a graphics engine, an Entity Component System (ECS), Node Based programming and a custom Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

So today, this project contains a lot of code, compiles into a single executable with no runtime dependencies and is functional on MacOS, Linux and Windows. It basically is a playground to learn and have fun. Think of it as a educational jack of all trades, master of none.

Language

ObjectTalk is a simple object-oriented scripting language that has evolved over decades and was heavily influenced by other languages. As a long time IT professional, I've seen a lot of software development with all its greatness and flaws. ObjectTalk represents what I think is a well-balanced scripting language that is easy to learn and can make even a novice look good quickly. If you are interested in how I got to where we are today, please see the history page for the story behind ObjectTalk.

Graphics

ObjectTalk contains a pretty decent 2D/3D graphics engine that works across multiple platforms providing system agnostic abstractions for the higher level capabilities. At its core, the graphics engine manages graphical resources (e.g. shaders, buffers, uniforms, textures and other assets) and is multithreaded. It also contains cross platform libraries to implement canvases, filters, generators, vector displays, font management, asynchronous asset loading in a variety of formats, 2D/3D geometric primitives, manifold definitions and 2D path manipulation.

Some of its capabilities are already exposed to the scripting language and the examples folder shows how to use it to create simple GUIs, run some games in a vintage vector display or implement a simple version of Pac-Man.

Nodes

Many years ago, I developed a graphical node-based editor to configure computer I/O systems complete with stream processing and protocol conversion. This worked really well and it allowed non-programmers to assist during development, maintenance and operations. Once I played with Blender's nodes for geometry and shaders, I thought it was a good idea to also add nodes to ObjectTalk. Please keep in mind though that becoming a Blender clone is not one of the ambitions of this project.

Each node really feels like an object instance and drawing connections between them is akin to visual programming. Today, in ObjectTalk, the IDE has an node editor that allows you to setup nodes and connect them into a graph. These graphs are automatically reevaluated when values change. The examples folder contains image processing chains and nodes are used in the scene examples to process images or create geometry. ObjectTalk already has over 50 nodes already and many will follow depending on my needs.

Scenes

My older 3D graphics projects were always based on OpenGL as at the time, it felt like a good cross-platform solution and a standard that most operating system providers would implement. Fast forwarding a few years and we now have a number of graphics APIs like DirectX, Vulkan and Metal with programmable shaders and all of them are different. So in the end, I decided that my graphics engine mentioned above will provide an abstraction over all of these APIs (in fact, the graphics engine uses DirectX on Windows, Vulkan on Linux and Metal on MacOS) and focus the 3D scene capability at a higher level.

This is where the Entity Component System (ECS) comes in as an architectural pattern that has already been used in games for many years. ObjectTalk's IDE contains an ECS editor that allows you to define entities (objects in the real world) and associate a variety of components with them that offer functionality.

The 3D scene ECS also has nodes and script components to make the whole thing more dynamic. In the examples folder, you'll find automatically spinning cubes based on timers and an earth rotating based on mouse movements. Both of these a driven by script components. The jungle and island examples use nodes to procedurally create terrain and asset instances.

To round it all out, modern engine features like geometry/model importing, support for animation, deferred rendering, Physically Based Rendering (PBR), particle systems, Image Based Lighting (IBL), Cascaded Shadow Maps (CSMs) and post processing with Fog, Bloom, God Rays, Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA), Exposure/Contrast correction and Tone Mapping are also available.

IDE

To round it all out, the ObjectTalk executable comes with a builtin Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that allows editing and execution of the ObjectTalk elements:

• ObjectTalk script editor

  • This editor provides a powerful syntax highlighting capability modeled after a subset of Visual Studio Code.
  • The editor has full undo capabilities and works with UTF-8 encoded text.
  • The editor can launch ObjectTalk scripts and has a console for output and highlighting for errors.
  • A visual debugger is also available.

• Node editor

  • This editor allows the visual creation of node graphs.
  • The editor has full undo capabilities.
  • The editor automatically evaluates graphs so it can be used for realtime visual programming (e.g. image processing or asset generation).

• Scene editor

  • This editor allows the creation and configuration of entities and components.
  • Entities are stored in trees making it easy to create entity hierarchies.
  • The editor has full undo capabilities.
  • Scenes can be run directly from the IDE to ensures node and script components function properly.

• Miscellaneous editors

  • The IDE is also capable of editing pure text, JSON and Markdown files (complete with syntax highlighting).