Ember

A from-scratch C++23 game engine with an editor, runtime, ECS, physics, audio, animation, and Lua scripting.

Ember is a personal game-engine project built from the ground up. It ships with a full editor (Ember-Forge), a standalone runtime (Ember-Runtime), and a clean Lua-based scripting layer so games can be built without recompiling the engine.

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Highlights

• Modern C++23 — built with premake5 and Visual Studio 2026.
• OpenGL renderer with PBR materials, IBL skyboxes, shadow maps, bloom, FXAA, fog, vignette, color-grading LUTs, outlines, billboards, particles, infinite grid, and 2D quad batching.
• Entity Component System with a hand-rolled registry, hierarchical transforms, prefabs, pooling, and per-component editor UIs.
• ReactPhysics3D integration — rigid bodies, box / sphere / capsule / convex / concave colliders, raycasts, overlap queries, configurable collision filters, and a kinematic character controller.
• Skeletal animation with crossfading, animation events, and a full animator component.
• Spatial audio powered by miniaudio.
• AI — waypoint paths, pathfinding agents, and local avoidance.
• Lua scripting via sol2 — hot-reloadable per-entity behaviours with editor-exposed properties. See docs/ScriptingAPI.md.
• Asset pipeline with UUID-based references, a custom .eba asset bundle, and a drag-and-drop project browser in the editor.
• Save game system for persistent key/value storage.
• Standalone runtime for shipping built games independent of the editor.

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Project Layout

Folder	Description
Ember/	The core engine library. All systems, rendering, physics, audio, scripting, ECS.
Ember-Forge/	The editor application. Scene editing, asset management, inspectors, ImGuizmo gizmos.
Ember-Runtime/	A minimal player application that loads and runs a packaged project.
Ember-Tools/	Offline tooling (asset bundling, etc.).
docs/	Documentation, including the scripting API reference.
scripts/	Helper batch / shell scripts for project generation.

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Building

Prerequisites

• Windows 10/11
• Visual Studio 2026 (Community works) with the Desktop development with C++ workload
• A GPU/driver that supports OpenGL 4.5+

Generate the solution

cd scripts\Windows
GenerateProjects.bat

This invokes the bundled vendor/premake/bin/premake5.exe with the vs2026 action. The generated solution lives in the repository root as Ember.sln.

Build

Open Ember.sln in Visual Studio and build. Three configurations are available:

Configuration	Use for
Debug	Day-to-day development. Asserts and full debug info.
Release	Optimized build with logging and asserts still enabled.
Dist	Final shipping configuration.

Ember-Forge is the default startup project. F5 launches the editor.

Cleaning

cd scripts\Windows
Clean.bat

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Quick Start

1. Build & launch Ember-Forge.
2. Create a project from the project picker (or open an existing one).
3. Drag assets (models, textures, audio, animations, shaders) into the Asset Manager panel.
4. Build a scene in the viewport. Add entities, attach components, parent them in the hierarchy.
5. Write gameplay in Lua. Create a .lua file under your project's scripts/ folder, attach a ScriptComponent to an entity, and assign the script. Editor-exposed properties from the script appear in the inspector automatically.
6. Press Play. Iterate. Press Stop. Repeat.

For the complete scripting reference (lifecycle hooks, every component property, math utilities, input enums, physics queries, audio, save data, and debug drawing), see docs/ScriptingAPI.md. For authoring custom GLSL shaders with editor-exposed properties, see docs/ShaderAPI.md.

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A Tiny Lua Script

local Spinner = {}

Spinner.SpeedDeg = 90.0  -- editable in the inspector

function Spinner:OnUpdate(entity, delta)
    local t = entity:GetComponent("TransformComponent")
    t.Rotation.y = t.Rotation.y + Math.Radians(self.SpeedDeg) * delta
end

return Spinner

Drop this onto any entity with a TransformComponent and it will spin. The full Scripting API reference covers the rest.

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Third-Party Libraries

Ember bundles (under Ember/vendor/ and Ember-Forge/vendor/):

• GLFW — windowing & input
• glad — OpenGL loader
• glm — math
• Dear ImGui — editor UI
• ImGuizmo — transform gizmos
• ReactPhysics3D — physics
• miniaudio — audio
• Lua + sol2 — scripting
• rapidyaml — serialization
• stb — image / font loading
• tinygltf — model importing

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License

Released under the MIT License. You are free to use, modify, and distribute this project, including for commercial purposes, provided the original copyright notice is retained.