Foreword

This book teaches roxlap — a pure-Rust voxel-scene engine descended from Ken Silverman’s Voxlap — to a game developer who has never seen the codebase. It sits between the README (the pitch and a 40-line quickstart) and the docs.rs API reference (every type and function): the README tells you whether you want roxlap, docs.rs tells you what each item does, and this book tells you how the pieces fit together and how to build a game with them.

Three other kinds of documentation exist and are linked from here where they help, but are not replaced by the book:

• docs.rs — the API reference. The book prefers linking a type over restating its signature, so the reference is always the fresher of the two.
• docs/porting/PORTING-*.md — internal stage histories: design rationale, dead ends, benchmarks. Read them when you want to know why something is built the way it is.
• The demo scenes (roxlap-scene-demo) — the runnable feature gallery. Every chapter’s topic has a demo tab you can fly around in; the demo tour maps features to scenes.

Code in this book is never pasted by hand: every snippet longer than a few lines is included directly from a compile-tested crate example or doctest, so if the book and the engine disagree, CI is already red.

The book tracks the engine: chapters are re-checked as stages land, and every include is CI-gated, so a snippet that stops compiling turns the build red before it can mislead you. How the book itself was built (and its anti-rot policy) is recorded in docs/porting/PORTING-BOOK.md.