Guiding Light

Our Engine is written in modern C++23. Its architecture is based on Object-Component model used by Unity. We use DirectX 11 as our graphics API (initially it was OpenGL, but we decided to port it).

Some notable systems:

• 2D physics engine (collision detection and resolution)
• Resource Manager (for sharing resources like models and textures)
• UI
• Runtime prefab loading
• Input and Event systems

We developed our own editor along with countless tools and functionalities:

• Scene and prefab loading
• Gizmos
• Curve editors
• Debug drawings
• Debug logging
• Shader hot-swapping
• Custom inspectors for specific Components

To speed up our work, we wrote a Python script that generates (de)serialization code for all components by parsing the C++ header files, similarly to UnrealHeaderTool. (We are very proud of that.)

We are using deferred rendering, with exceptions for transparent objects and UI that use forward rendering. We managed to implement a couple of rendering algorithms:

• Screen Space Reflection
• Screen Space Refraction
• Volumetric light scattering
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)
• Particles (and particle emitters, done on CPU)
• Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing (FXAA)
• Gerstner waves (for water geometry)
• Shadow mapping (including point lights)
• Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows

Editor’s UI is made with ImGui and it’s extensions: ImGuizmo, ImPlot. Audio is handled by miniaudio. glm for additional math operations.
(De)serializing yaml: yaml-cpp. Window abstraction: glfw. Helper loading libraries used: DDSTextureLoader, stb_image, assimp, FW1FontWrapper.