PDG engine v0.9.5
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Pixel Dust Game Engine (PDG)

PDG is an open source, professional quality 2D game engine. It provides system independent abstractions of common elements needed by game developers. It can be used directly from C++ or used from scripting languages like Javascript.

This is the documentation for the Javascript API.

Features

Design Goals

PDG is focused on making a broad array of capabilities available to developers regardless of the OS platform they are targeting. Currently it works on Mac OS X, Windows, and iOS. The Non-GUI build (and node.js plugin) also work on Linux.

The PDG API is designed to make simple things easy to do, without adding undue complexity to more complicated problems.

History

PDG was originally developed in 2003 by Ed Zavada of Pixel Dust Games for use in Catan Online. It was later updated by Dream Rock Studios for use in their game Parthenon. Those updates included OpenGL hardware acceleration, a sprite engine, and iOS support. In 2012 it was further updated with Chipmunk physics, Javascript bindings, and then made open source under the MIT license.

Usage assumptions

PDG is supplied in several different forms:

No languages other than Javascript and C++ are currently supported, though Ruby bindings have been created in the past. The Javascript bindings could serve as a guide for anyone wishing to add support for other languages.

Roles and Responsibilities

PDG is integrated with Node.js, so all of the excellent networking, file i/o, encyption, process management and debugging facilities of Node.js are available to you. For multiplayer games you can write your server with Node.js, and use PDG as an add-on module if needed. On the client side, you can run as a double clickable application with PDG providing most of the functionality, and Node.js modules available for networking and so forth.

In most cases PDG does not duplicate functionality already in Node.js. There are, however a few notable exceptions:

What's missing?

There are a few things we'd like to add to PDG, but haven't had time to build yet. Some are pretty simple, others rather larger. In no particular order, they are:

Game Kits

PDG doesn't provide any implementation of higher level functionality commonly used in games, such as AI, pathfinding, dialog trees, tooltips, character classes, dynamic map generation, segmented loading of large maps, etc.. You should be able to build those things as needed for your game.

We do plan to build Game Kits for a variety of game genres on top of PDG, so check to see if they are available and have what you need.

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