Qwadro is an autonomous execution ecosystem, a level-3 system infrastructure, a data-oriented virtual platform, that offers a set of common building blocks to build systems analogous to game engines. It is a coalition of middlewares and engines.
Qwadro is not a game engine. Qwadro is an initiative of the SIGMA Federation to foster the genuine development of hardware-accelerated 2D, 3D and 4D drawing applications for the Latin American audience. This is a top secret project with top secret objectives as expected. Yeah, now you know about it we have to led you to some basement from El Dorado.
Why is Qwadro not a game engine? Because the Qwadro ecosystem was initially made to run old demoscenes, mainly from RenderWare, but not limited to them, and then to be necessarily customized, always creating different products, as in-house game engines were made in the past, when everything seemed to be distinguishable and was made using a specific technology.
Despite little current similarity, Qwadro AFX emerged as a fork of the RenderWare Platform in an attempt to rebuild the demos in a multithreaded paradigm and OpenGL.
After certain maneuvers, RenderWare proved to be very inefficient on new hardware, that is, certain procedures could be better optimized for current hardware capabilities at the same or lower computational cost.
Currently, Qwadro constitutes a collection of middlewares integrating systems, subsystems and drivers, abstracting operating systems and platforms.
Despite the name, the code domain prefix (in C, equivalent to the namespace in C++) is AFX. There are other prefixes for other partitions (AVX, AEX, AAX, AMX, AUX, ATX, etc). The SIGMA reserves for itself and its experiments every possible prefix A*X for official expansions of the Qwadro.
The API and general code design was inspired by Havok Physics and, mainly the object model, by Qt Framework, in addition to preserving some semantics remaining from RenderWare.
There are several strange names in Qwadro, because Qwadro is an experiment that implements several paradigms of the same concept with random names to test both in parallel, and its API changes frequently depending on usage optimization. And… it is governed by methodist laws of Go Horse.
Some RenderWare heritage still present is certainly in the AMX, where Qwadro’s mathematics resides. For example, we have afxRaster, afxQuat, afxV3d, afxV4d.
Qwadro was firstly designed for POSIX/Unix/Linux systems. But due complexities handling multiple OpenGL contexts in Windows, we was forced to move to Windows and stay there still now.
About code generation, Qwadro code base was written for compilation in LLVM/Clang. No other toolset was tested except MSVC, wich is not supported due it had never been a real C compiler but a C++ compiler. Qwadro also doesn’t use CMake because the main developer had problems with Visual Studio 2017, the IDE used to code Qwadro.
Game-related works featured in Qwadro are strongely inspired in notorious gaming works on Bang! Engine by Ensemble Studios and MaxFX by Remedy Entertainment.