Features
Built from the metal up for embedded hardware.
DRM/KMS Direct Rendering
No X11. No Wayland. No display server at all. Lodestone talks directly to the Linux kernel's DRM/KMS subsystem, giving you full control over display planes, CRTCs, and connectors. This means zero overhead from compositor protocols, no frame synchronization issues with window managers, and direct access to the hardware's capabilities.
The result: predictable frame timing, minimal latency, and a rendering pipeline that's as close to the metal as you can get without writing kernel drivers.
GLES 2.0 Rendering Pipeline
OpenGL ES 2.0 is the sweet spot for embedded GPU programming — powerful enough for 2D and basic 3D, supported by virtually every mobile and embedded GPU ever made, and simple enough that the entire pipeline is comprehensible by a single developer.
Lodestone's renderer handles shader compilation, texture management, and draw call batching. Supports both 2D sprite rendering and 3D perspective camera with model-view-projection matrices.
Scene System
Entity-component architecture with typed slots. Each entity is a collection of components — transform, sprite, physics body, camera, script — that can be mixed and matched without deep inheritance hierarchies.
Scene v2 introduces entity-component slots: named, typed attachments that provide structured access to entity data. Clean separation between data and behavior.
Physics (Box2D)
Integrated Box2D physics for 2D games. Bodies, fixtures, joints — the full Box2D API exposed through Lodestone's scene system. Physics bodies are first-class scene components.
Create physics worlds, add bodies with shapes, set up collision detection, and let Box2D handle the simulation. All through Lodestone's entity-component interface.
Input System
Linux evdev input handling for gamepads, keyboards, and touch devices. No SDL dependency — direct device file reading with event polling and mapping.
FPS camera controller with gamepad support included as a built-in sample. Analog stick dead zones, button mapping, and multi-device support.
Cross-Compilation
Full CMake-based build system with cross-compilation toolchains for ARM targets. Develop on x86, deploy to Raspberry Pi. The build system handles sysroot configuration, library paths, and architecture-specific flags automatically.
All 8 subsystems and 6 sample apps build cleanly for both x86 (development) and ARM (deployment).
* Apart from GLES 2.0, DRM/KMS, and Box2D — all standard system libraries on Raspberry Pi OS.