Mach v0.3 has been released! For all the details check out the announcement

Frequently asked questions

When will the engine be released?

There won’t be one major event, rather it will be a bunch of small/incremental releases building up to it. You can look at the engine roadmap to get an idea of what we’re working on currently, and what will come later.

Can I use Mach to make a simple 2D game?

Using the engine? Definitely not today.

Using Mach core, maybe:

  • There is a sprite2d example which lets you load a JSON texture atlas and draws sprites on the screen you could use as a starting point. However, it is ~400 lines of code, a good amount of that is low-level graphics programming.
  • You will need to bring your own:
    • Math library
    • Physics library
    • GUI library
    • Text rendering (though we have freetype bindings you can use, text rendering is quite involved.)

If what you are looking for is a high-level simple 2D graphics API, we don’t have that today. I suggest you look elsewhere for right now; I’m a big fan of Raylib and there are people using it from Zig.

We are actively working on higher-level engine APIs that will make simple 2D games nice to build in Zig, but they’re not ready for use yet. See the engine roadmap for details.

Can I use Mach to make a simple 3D game?

Using the engine? Definitely not today.

Using Mach core, maybe:

  • There are examples for 3D model loading, however the examples for this are ~1000 lines of code and a good amount of the code is low-level graphics programming.
  • You will need to bring your own:
    • Math library
    • Physics library
    • GUI library
    • Text rendering (though we have freetype bindings you can use, text rendering is quite involved.)

It will be a while before we have good high-level 3D graphics support; a lot of other pieces need to land first. See the engine roadmap for details.