Glossary

Core types

Object

Anything built on Hyperion's object system. It gets reflection, ref counting, serialization and a unique ID. Those IDs only last for the current run, so don't save them anywhere.

Class

Runtime info about a type: its name, fields, methods and parents. Mark a class with HYP_CLASS() and CodeGen takes care of the rest.

Handle

A strong reference to an object. When the last handle goes away, so does the object. Make one with MakeHandle<T>(). WeakHandle is the non-owning version.

Scenes and what's in them

World

The top of the tree. It holds your scenes, plus world-wide things like physics and audio.

Scene

A level, or a region of your world. It's a tree of nodes, with an octree on the side for fast spatial queries.

Node

Something with a position, rotation and scale that can have children. Children move with their parent.

Entity

A node you can attach components to. Most things in your game will be entities.

Component

A chunk of data attached to an entity, like a mesh or a transform. Components describe what an entity is.

System

Code that runs over every entity with a certain set of components, in parallel. Components are the data; systems are the logic.

Subsystem

Like a system, but for the whole world rather than any one scene. It gets an Update() call every frame.

Camera, Light

Entities that view the scene and light it.

View

What a camera sees: the slice of your scene that gets rendered. You can have a few at once, like one for the main camera and one for shadows.

Swatch

A saved look for your world, like Noon or Dusk. Each swatch can have its own baked lighting.

Rendering

Render proxy

Rendering runs on its own thread. Scene objects hand their data over through render proxies: the game thread writes, the render thread reads.

Render group

Objects that render the same way, batched together for instancing and culling. Think of it as roughly one graphics pipeline.