Hyperion Engine is a high performance game engine written in C++ 20, with a focus on modern rendering techniques such as clustered shading, gpu driven rendering, ray tracing, and a high performance Vulkan graphics backend. This project started as a fork of an earlier engine project that I started working on in 2016, but has since been almost completely rewritten and redesigned from the ground up.
- Real time global illumination and reflections via Ray tracing and screen-space options for non-RT capable hardware.
- Clustered deferred shading supporting a large number of dynamic lights while maintaining good frame times. Uses forward clustered shading for translucent materials.
- Visual editor, supporting Windows and macOS. Supports project files, scene editing, asset importing, etc.
- Offline light baking system integrated into the editor. Bake lightmap volumes into the scene, EnvProbes (reflections and irradiance), particpating medium / fog volumes, and other static lighting data such as shadow maps. (Requries GPU ray tracing support for baking.)
- Integrated real-time path tracer to allow lighting reference before baking.
- Shader compiler system with built in permutations support - just use
PERMUTE(...)in your shader code to define a permutation set, and the engine will automatically compile all combinations of that permutation and make it available for use at runtime. - Level streaming and world partitioning system to enable efficient memory usage and larger worlds
- Scripting via C# or our custom scripting language, HypScript.
- Hot reloading for shaders and scripts for fast iteration time.
Currently, we are focusing our efforts on developing the engine for Windows, macOS and Android. Editor support is available on Windows and macOS.
Linux support is planned for the future but not in active development. Contributions welcome on that front if you are interested in that!
The engine is in early access and is not yet ready for production use. But if you are feeling adventurous, we welcome you to try it out and see what you can create (or break)!
To get started, check out the Compiling the Engine guide to set up your development environment and compile the engine.
If you want to contribute please feel free to submit a pull request! We are open to contributions of all kinds, from bug fixes and documentation improvements to new features and systems. We ask that if you use AI tools to assist with your contribution, please disclose that in your pull request and ensure that the contribution meets the same quality standards as a human written contribution. Thanks!
Definitions and Terminology provides definitions and explanations for various terms and concepts used within the engine. - This is slightly outdated and/or incomplete, but it is a good starting point.
Console Commands are commands that can be executed in the editor's console window to perform various actions or set global states that the engine can use to modify rendering, physics, gameplay, etc.