ORX

Orx provides a complete game creation framework including a 3D scene graph, hardware accelerated 2D rendering, animation, input, sound and physics. Its main goals are to allow fast game prototyping and creation.^[2]

Orx is published under the Zlib license.

ORX's development began in July 2002, reusing code written by Roman Killian, but was abandoned. The project was picked up again in 2007.

In 2009, ORX version 1.0rc0 was released. This version of ORX added support for Mac OS X (x86) as well as the support for Win32 and Linux (x86). Generic input system like keyboard, mouse and joystick input and fragment shader support were introduced.

ORX version 1.2 was released in 2010. It came with bugs fixes and optimizations. The major update was the support for iOS and Unicode.

ORX version 1.3rc0 was introduced in 2011. It came out with a bunch of new features like joint support, variable width fonts, OpenGL 2.0 and others. Previous issues and bugs were also resolved. This was the first time when Android support was also added to the engine.

ORX version 1.4cr0 was introduced in 2012. Some new features were added to ORX in this update like Interactive console, commands, textured mesh rendering, geometry rendering and previously known issues were fixed.

ORX version 1.11 was released in May 2020 with support changes for MinGW-w64, including new support for 64bit, OSX/Retina and Windows high DPI display, control over polled physical peripherals, text animations and more.

ORX version 1.12 has been released in May 2021, with major speed & scalability improvements, a complete rewrite of the orxBANK module, support for joysticks on Android-Native, simpler Android build pipeline and Nuklear support for new projects.

ORX version 1.13 was released in March 2022, with new features, including a new SoundSystem plugin based on MiniAudio (OGG, WAV & MP3 files), support for config-driven filters for both sounds and buses, multiple sound listeners, sound panning, sound spatialization, Support for the QOI image format, native arm64 and with support for MacOS 11/XCode 12.x.

ORX version 1.14 was released in June 2023, with 50+ updates or new features, including a revamp of Android integration using (GameActivity, Swappy, Paddleboat).

ORX version 1.15 was released in August 2024.

ORX version 1.16 was released in June 2025, with 48+ updates or new features, including the Web/HTML5 platform support, runtime TrueType/OpenType font support, SDF fonts are supported (either generated offline or at runtime). Support for QOA (audio) and PNM, GIF & PSD (bitmap) formats is added. Plugins are now handled as resources.

Orx is written in C and has an object oriented design with a plugin architecture. This allows its kernel to be cross-platform and delegates hardware- and OS-dependent tasks to plugins. Most of these plugins are based on other open-source libraries, such as GLFW, SDL and Box2D (LiquidFun fork).

Build files are provided for GCC makefiles, Visual Studio (2017, 2019 & 2022), Codelite, Code::Blocks and Xcode.

Orx contains

• automated sprite rendering using 3D hardware acceleration allowing: translations, anisotropic scale, rotation, transparency (alpha blending), coloring (multiply, add and subtract blends), tiling and mirroring
• advanced resource management
• Multiple Render Targets (MRT) and advance compositing support
• geometric display primitives and textured mesh rendering
• camera/viewport system allowing multiple views on one screen with camera translations, zooms and rotations
• 3D scene graph used for object positioning, allowing grouped translations, rotations and scales
• sound and music with volume, pitch and loop control, spatialization, hierarchical buses, filters, recording, etc.
• 2D physics engine (LiquidFun - fork of Box2D)
• collision detection and rigid body physics and joints
• animation system
• event management
• custom fragment (pixel) shader support
• unicode support
• custom bitmap font rendering
• real time CPU profiler
• interactive "debug" console
• multi-monitor support
• clipboard support

It also provides^[3]

• data driven object creation: managing resources requires little code, everything is controlled through configuration files
• during dev phases, resources can be automatically hotloaded at runtime upon modification on disk, shortening drastically iteration times
• a clock system, allowing the user to keep time consistency, having the ability of doing local or global time stretching
• an animation chaining graph: animation transitions are defined in a graph, this allows the code to request only the final target animation; all transitions will be automated depending on the starting animation
• a custom animation event system, which allows easy synchronization with parts of animations
• a visual FX system: config-based combination of curves of sine, sawtooth and linear shapes that can be plugged on object properties: color, alpha, position, translation or rotation
• a powerful resource system that allows users to easily abstract resource access and work with separated development files as well as packed ones for release builds, or even use different sets of resources on different platforms, without having to change a line of code ^[4]
• an automated differential scrolling with depth scaling and differential scrolling controlled through config files, allowing differential parallax scrolling on any number of planes
• a configuration system, featuring inheritance, direct random control, encryption/decryption, filtered save and history reload. This allows the user to tweak almost everything without having to change code
• a spawning system, allowing the user to easily create weapon bullets or, combined with the visual FX system, elaborate visual graphic effects
• an easy UI object positioning system that supports different aspect ratio and provides easy picking/selection framework
• a generic input system: allows users to use any kind of controllers (mouse, joystick, keyboard, touch, accelerometer, ...) through an abstract layer. The user asks for input status using plain names, bindings being done in config files or on the fly for user input customization, for example
• simple scripting via a combination of timelines and commands
• multi-threading support with asynchronous resources loading and hotloading support

• SFML
• SDL
• Box2D
• GP2X
• Codelite