Ard Engine

A game engine designed for open world 3D games.

Goals

• Moddable: Users of games made with the engine will be able to easily modify, add, or remove content.
• Streaming: Streaming of assets will be handled automatically by the engine.
• Big worlds: The engine will support large open worlds.
• Collaborative: The editor will have integration with version control software, making collaboration easy.

Features

General

• High performance parallelized ECS.
• Event driven game loop.
• Plugin system.
• Async asset loading.

Rendering

⚠️WARNING: In order to use the renderer, you need a GPU with support for Vulkan 1.3, mesh shading, and ray tracing. I do not have plans to support GPUs without these features.

• 3D rendering.
• Bindless textures and materials.
• Unified vertex memory.
• GPU driven rendering.
• Texture streaming.
• Cascaded shadow mapping.
• Forward rendering with a Z-prepass.
• Clustered lighting.
• GPU occlusion culling.
• PBR rendering with realtime image based lighting.
• Effects like ambient occlusion, crepuscular rays, bloom, and more.
• Mesh shading.
• Hardware accelerated path tracing reference.

Directory Structure

• crates: Contains all the crates that make up the engine.
• src: Contains the high-level crate for the entire engine which re-exports other crates.
• tools: Binaries used by the editor.

Building

⚠️WARNING: The build files are tested in a Windows environment. They might fail if you attempt to build on another platform. If you encounter any problems, please feel free to open an issue ticket.

Dependencies

Before following the build instructions, install the following dependencies.

Dependency	Tested Version
Rust	1.79.0
cargo-make	0.37.12
Vulkan SDK	1.3.283.0

Instructions

1. Run cargo make --profile=opt-dev build-editor to compile the editor.
2. Run /build/opt-dev/ard-editor.exe to use the editor.