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.