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.
• Beginner editor documentation for Ember-Forge projects, scenes, assets, components, scripting, playtesting, and exporting. See docs/Editor/README.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 and editor guide.
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 step-by-step editor basics, see docs/Editor/README.md. 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.