What is JEM exactly?

JEM is a game engine that is packed as an executable. The game it self is loaded as dll and so are any mods/plugins.

This reversed process has some benefits over normal linking:

Default Plugin/modding support (Since everything is a dynamic plugin)
Better Plugin performance since it is based on cpp (not an any interpreted language)
Easier development of official plugin interfaces
Game engine can just be used for multiple Games
Game engine swapable or modable (modding of the Game Engine by replacing the executable is not recommended).

There are also some minor drawbacks:

Bigger Executable size (the whole game engine needs to be packed into the Executable no room for optimizations)
Version management might be a bit more complicated for normal games, however it is not a lot more complicated than normal official modding support.

Why JEM?

Besides the stated pros above JEM aims to support following things:

Platform independent code
Multithreading by default (ECS)
Multiplayer support and interfaces
High performance
High flexibility
Easy Plugin system

What is not going to be supported?

Not much on this side besides web, mobile and hardware not capable of running Vulkan. The reason is simply the Vulkan only ideology and high optimization for performance and possible support for FSR/DLSS, Raytracing, etc.

And if you are talking about platform compatibility. Well nowadays almost all hardware that is capable of running modern games supports Vulkan. Hardware that is older is very likely not capable of running those games. So it isn't worth the maintenance and possible performance regression for other platforms.

Want to contribute?

JEM is open source and contributions are great. Just fork the project and make sure you installed pre-commit correctly (see Getting Started). After this just make a Github PR.

Platform support

JEM does officially supports Windows and Linux.

However MacOS is possible but not planned currently due to the lack of tester and developers. Feel to make contributions for MacOS.

Android and IOS support isn't very likely to be a thing in JEM (main problem is the plugin system). However feel free to make suggestions/discussions and creating contributions.