Overview

CEngine is a data-oriented GPU driven C99 engine with a small amount of C++ used for basis texture compression. It builds an SDL3 GPU-based executable and now contains much more than a playground: a scene system, deferred renderer, asset pipeline, editor UI, animation, and streamed voxel terrain with lod.

Features

• Scene and asset pipeline with glTF/FBX import
• Compute shader Hi-Z oclussion culling + frustum culling for draws and lights.
• BVH data structure over the world, (ray casting + picking support)
• Texture system with 4k texture2d atlass array's instead of bindless textures
• All objects in a world can be rendered with single draw call
• Clay layout with SDF UI shapes such as rounded rectangle circle
• Slug text rendering high quality with all alphabets/languages supported without texture atlasses. Thanks Eric Lengyel
• Editor tooling with dockable UI, scene editing, asset browsing.
• Streamed voxel terrain with procedural generation, sculpt/paint editing, and persisted terrain edits.
• Full compute + raster animation pipeline.

Graphics Features

• Deferred lighting.
• GPU compute draw call recording with HI-Z oclussion culling + frustum culling + lod selection
• Directional cascaded + point and spot light shadows.
• Animation compute and animated-vertex generation.
• HBAO, MLAA, tonemapping, god rays, procedural sky.
• Precompiled shader outputs for SPIR-V and Metal (spv/, msl/).

Project Layout

• Source/Rendering/: renderer, pipelines, compute passes, shadows, draw submission.
• Source/AssetManagement/: glTF/FBX import, mesh baking, texture processing, asset caching.
• Source/Editor/: editor windows, scene tools, terrain tools, asset browser, console.
• Source/Terrain/: streamed voxel terrain, Transvoxel meshing, edit persistence.
• Source/UI/: custom UI renderer/windowing/text integration.
• Include/: public engine headers.
• Math/: math types, matrices, vectors, colors, quaternions, SIMD helpers.
• Extern/: bundled third-party dependencies.

External Libraries

Library	Purpose	Used by
SDL3	Platform + GPU backend	CMakeLists.txt
basis_universal	Texture compression	CMakeLists.txt
ufbx	FBX import	AssetManager.c
meshoptimizer	Mesh optimization	MeshBake.c
clay	Editor UI layout	Include/UIRenderer.h
kb_text_shape	Text shaping	KBTextShape.c
stb_rect_pack	Atlas packing	TextureSystem.c
stb_sprintf	Formatting	Platform.c
stb_image	Image loading	tools/scripts
stb_image_resize2	Image resizing	tools/scripts
stb_truetype	Font parsing	Slug.c
stb_image_write	Image writing	tools/scripts
stb_perlin	Terrain noise	graphics
tlsf	Allocator	Source/Memory.c, Graphics.c
dynarray	Dynamic arrays	AssetManager.c
sj	glTF JSON parsing	GLTFParser.c
sdefl / sinfl	Compression	AssetManager.c, TerrainEdit.c

Prerequisites

Install a C/C++ toolchain and CMake 3.16+.

Windows

• Visual Studio (MSVC) or LLVM/Clang
• Optional: Ninja for faster builds

macOS

• Xcode Command Line Tools
• CMake

Linux

• GCC or Clang
• CMake

Build Notes

• SDL3 is bundled in Extern/SDL3, so no separate SDL install is normally required.
• OpenMP is detected optionally by CMake and enabled when found.
• The project builds a single executable target: CEngine.
• Shader helper edits may require a forced rebuild, especially shared shader helper headers.

How to Compile

python 3.9 and above

python Build/Compile.py

Basic build

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build

Windows (Ninja)

winget install Ninja-build.Ninja
cmake -S . -B Debug -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
cmake --build Debug
cmake -S . -B Release -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build Release