Golias Engine

Golias Engine is a lightweight and modular 2D/3D game engine/framework written in C/C++, designed to be * simple yet powerful*.

⚠️ Note: Currently there is no Editor and one is unlikely to exist in the future.
Golias focuses on code-driven development, cross-platform compatibility, and learning.

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Rendering Backends & Supported Platforms

Renderer Backend	Status
OpenGL 3.3 / OpenGLES 3.0	✅ Fully supported
Metal	⚠️ In Progress
Vulkan	✅ Fully supported
Direct3D 12	✅ Fully supported
Proprietary APIs	🚫 No ETA

Platform	Category	Notes	Status
Windows	Desktop		✅
Linux	Desktop		✅
macOS	Desktop		✅
Android	Mobile		✅
iOS	Mobile		✅
Web	Web	WebAssembly / WebGL	✅
Xbox	Console	This platform requires NDA	🚫
PlayStation	Console	This platform requires NDA	🚫
Nintendo	Console	This platform requires NDA	🚫

⚠️ Note: Proprietary APIs for consoles are not publicly available and thus cannot be implemented or tested.

Features

• Model Loading
• PBR (Physically Based Rendering) — Cook-Torrance GGX BRDF
  • Metallic-Roughness workflow
  • Albedo, Normal, Metallic-Roughness, AO, Emissive maps
  • Clear coat
  • Subsurface scattering
  • Parallax occlusion mapping
• Blinn-Phong Shading Model
• Skybox (Cubemap 6-face & Equirectangular)
• IBL (Image-Based Lighting) — diffuse irradiance + specular environment
• Culling
  • Frustum Culling
  • Occlusion Culling
• Normal Mapping (TBN calculated per fragment)
• 3D Physics (Bullet Physics)
  • Rigid Bodies (Static, Dynamic, Kinematic)
  • Collision Shapes (Box, Sphere, Capsule, Convex Hull, Triangle Mesh)
  • Character Controller (capsule-based kinematic with stepping & jumping)
  • Soft Body Physics
  • Joints & Constraints
• Lighting System
  • Directional Light
  • Point Light
  • Spot Light
  • Area Light
  • Light Probes
  • Volumetric Lighting / Fog
• Shadow Mapping
  • CSM (Cascaded Shadow Maps) — 4 cascades, PCF 3×3 soft shadows
• Screen Space Reflections (SSR) — Simplified binary screen-space ray marching (noisy)
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) — hemisphere kernel, 32 samples, blur pass
• Depth pre-pass - reduce overdraw
• Post-Processing Pipeline
  • Bloom — without up/downsampling (single-pass threshold + blur)
  • SSAO — hemisphere kernel, 32 samples, blur pass
  • FXAA — fast approximate anti-aliasing
  • Tone Mapping — Reinhard, ACES, Uncharted2, AGX
  • HDR Rendering — R16G16B16A16_FLOAT render targets, GLES3 fallback
  • Gamma Correction
  • Color Grading
  • Depth of Field
  • Chromatic Aberration
  • Vignetting
  • Motion Blur
  • Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA)
• Animation System
  • Skeletal Animation — CPU & GPU skinning
  • Hierarchical Animation
  • Blend Trees
  • Inverse Kinematics (IK)
• Level of Detail (LOD) Support
• Decal System
• Global Illumination
• Terrain System

General Features

• Sprite Rendering
• Text Rendering
  • Truetype Font Support (FreeType)
  • Bitmap Font Support
  • Rich Text Support (color, size, font, etc.)
  • Text Layout Engine (line breaking, alignment, kerning)
  • Multilingual Text Support (Unicode, RTL languages)
  • Emoji Support
• Audio System (spatial & non-spatial, OGG/WAV/FLAC/MP3)
• Particle System (CPU & GPU)
• Cross-Platform Unified Rendering Pipeline by design
• Web (WASM) Support
• Native Support: Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS and Web
• Entity Component System (ECS) (EnTT)
  • Scene serialization / deserialization (Yaml)
  • Prefab system
• Custom Shader Language based on GLSL
• Scripting Support - [x] Native Scripting (c++) - [ ] Python Scripting (pocketpy)
• UI Canvas System (SCREEN / WORLD space)
  • Text
  • Button
  • Image
  • Slider
  • Panel
  • Dropdown
  • Nine-Patch
  • Rich Text
  • Layout Groups (Horizontal, Vertical, Grid)
  • InputTextField
• Networking Module
  • Client / Server architecture (ENet)
  • State synchronization
  • RPC (Remote Procedure Calls)
  • HTTP/s Requests (libcurl)
  • WebSocket Support (?)
• Instanced Rendering
• Job System / Multithreading

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Supported File Formats

Asset Type	Supported Formats
3D Models	See Assimp Supported Formats
Images	PNG, JPEG, BMP, TGA, DDS (Unsupported), ETC.
Fonts	TTF & OTF.
Audio	OGG, WAV, FLAC, MP3, ETC.
Serialization	Json & Yaml
Shaders	Custom GLSL-based shader language
UI Layouts	Custom XML format
Scenes	Custom YAML format

Engine Core Architecture

⚠️ Note: This diagram is a work in progress and may not reflect the current state of the engine.

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📚 Documentation & Examples

• Official Documentation
• Examples
• Tests

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Building from Source

Please refer to the BUILDING.md file for detailed instructions on how to build Golias Engine from source on various platforms.

Third-Party Libraries Used

All third-party libraries are vendored as git submodules or included directly in the thirdparty/ directory, check their respective licenses for more details.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

⚠️ Disclaimer: This project is a personal endeavor and is not affiliated with any company or organization. It is intended for educational and experimental purposes only.