Painted timber bracket sets (dougong) inside the Manjusri Hall

In development · Not yet released

Joinery for real-time worlds.

The whole game is a tree of entity nodes, spliced together and scripted in TenonScript. Release builds compile ahead of time through LLVM. Rendering is Vulkan path tracing, with no raster fallback.

View on GitHub See the joint ↓

Model: A tree
Script: .tns
Shipping: AOT · LLVM
Render: Vulkan RT

BRACKET SETS · MANJUSRI HALL

01The joint

Two parts.
No nails.

A tenon is cut to fit its mortise, and the two hold by shape. Tenon builds a game the same way: entity nodes spliced into one tree, each one seated where it belongs.

Entity

The node

The unit of the tree. Its fields are properties, and a property is not a node.

Graft

project.tproj

Binds an entity as another node's subsidiary. Declared in TML, not in a script.

Attach

At runtime

Instantiates that subsidiary onto a property.

FIG. 1 — THROUGH-TENON WITH LOCKING PIN

STATE APARTDRAG TO ROTATE

02Lineage

Held by shape alone.

Mortise-and-tenon joinery has carried Chinese timber halls for more than a thousand years. Some of the buildings below have stood since the Tang dynasty.

Foguang Temple, Mount Wutai · East Hall, 857 CE — FOGUANG TEMPLE, MOUNT WUTAI · EAST HALL, 857 CE

Nanchan Temple, Mount Wutai · 782 CE — NANCHAN TEMPLE, MOUNT WUTAI · 782 CE

Manjusri Hall · interior bracketing — MANJUSRI HALL · INTERIOR BRACKETING

03The model

One tree.
Nothing loose.

The root node is the game itself. Everything else is spliced on. The tree is how the game is controlled: it says what exists and how it behaves. Rendering, physics and audio are backends. They are not nodes, and they never appear in the tree.

Entity nodes

The unit you place, spawn and address. Data on a node lives in properties. A property is a field: it does not become a node, and it has no children.

Graft, then attach

A graft binds one entity as the subsidiary node of another. The binding is written in project.tproj, not in code. At runtime, attachment instantiates that subsidiary onto a property, so the instance sits exactly where the field says.

One block name

Every entity has a single block name, unique across the project. A script reaches it by writing $BlockName. Compilation resolves that to a NodePath. An AOT build lowers the path to a fixed index; under the VM the same lookup stays hot through an inline cache.

Logic stays out of the tree

A .tns file holds game logic and nothing structural. The shape of the game is project.tproj. Configuration is project.tconf. Scripts change behavior. They do not describe structure.

Files · all of them TML

.tns: Game logic only.
project.tproj: The tree, and every graft.
project.tconf: Configuration.
.tnm: One level per file. The filename is the level name, and the two are locked.
.tnmc: The compiled level.