Vector Siege

A small Asteroids-style arcade game in C++20 / SFML 3, built less as "a game" and more as a sandbox for the kind of low-level work I'm interested in: object pooling instead of per-frame heap churn, a small persistent thread pool for parallel collision checks, and a runtime profiler overlay (F1) that times each subsystem and graphs frame time live.

Why these design choices

• No allocations during gameplay. ObjectPool<T, Capacity> is a fixed flat array with a free-index stack. Asteroids and bullets are acquired/released from these pools instead of new/delete, so frame time stays predictable even with a few hundred entities on screen.
• Parallel collision pass. ThreadPool::parallelFor splits the bullet-vs-asteroid broad phase across worker threads. Each chunk collects its own local hit list and only takes a lock once, when merging — not per pair — to avoid turning a perf win into a perf loss from contention.
• Built-in profiler. Profiler records per-category millisecond samples into ring buffers and draws a live frame-time graph plus per-subsystem averages/max, similar in spirit to the kind of instrumentation you'd want around an emulator or SoC functional model. Press F1 in-game to toggle it.

Screenshots

Controls

Key	Action
Left/Right or A/D	Rotate ship
Up or W	Thrust
Space	Fire
F1	Toggle profiler overlay
R	Restart after game over
Esc	Quit

Building

Requires CMake 3.16+ and a C++20 compiler. SFML 3 is pulled automatically via FetchContent — no manual install needed.

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j
./build/VectorSiege

On Linux you'll need SFML's runtime dependencies if they're not already on your system (X11, FreeType, etc.):

sudo apt install libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libudev-dev \
    libfreetype-dev libflac-dev libvorbis-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libegl1-mesa-dev

Drop a .ttf file into assets/font.ttf for the HUD/profiler text (see assets/README.txt) — the game runs without it, just without on-screen text.

Layout

include/   ObjectPool, ThreadPool, Profiler, Entities, Game (headers)
src/       Game.cpp (simulation + render), main.cpp
assets/    font.ttf goes here