Tectonic Engine

A modern, feature-rich 3D game engine written in pure C, inspired by classic FPS engines.

Tectonic Engine - Feature Set

An overview of the core technologies and rendering capabilities of the Tectonic Engine.

Rendering & Lighting

Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) Pipeline: Core rendering is built on a deferred PBR model using a metallic/roughness workflow, enabling realistic material interactions with light.
Normal Mapping: Supported on both world geometry (brushes) and models for high-frequency surface detail.
Relief Mapping: Height maps can be used to create the illusion of depth and self-shadowing on surfaces, providing a more convincing 3D effect than standard normal mapping.

Dynamic Lighting System: Supports a large number of fully dynamic point and spot lights with configurable color, intensity, and radius.

Light Styles & Presets: Lights can utilize preset animation styles for effects such as flickering, strobing, and pulsing.
Light Cookies: Spotlights support projected textures (cookies) for gobo and patterned lighting effects.
Shadow Mapping: Real-time dynamic shadows are supported for all light types.
Omnidirectional Shadows: Point lights use cubemap shadow maps for 360-degree shadow coverage.
Projected Shadows: Spotlights and the sun use standard 2D shadow maps for efficient directional shadowing.
Percentage-Closer Filtering (PCF): Implemented for soft shadow edges.
Global Illumination via Lightmapping, the engine supports staticly baked lightmaps, including directional lightmaps for realistic specular and normal mapping
High-Dynamic Range (HDR) Lighting: The entire lighting pipeline operates in HDR.
Auto-Exposure: The final image exposure is automatically adjusted based on scene luminance, simulating the human eye's adaptation to light and dark areas.
Bloom: Bright areas of the scene realistically "bloom" into neighboring areas, enhancing the HDR effect.
Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO): Adds contact shadows and depth to scenes by darkening creases, corners, and ambiently lit areas.
Volumetric Lighting: Supports "god rays" and light shafts from the sun and other dynamic lights, rendering visible beams of light through the environment.
Water Rendering: Features environmental reflections using cubemaps, Fresnel effects for angle-dependent reflectivity, and flowmapping for a dynamic appearance.
Glass & Refraction: Supports translucent glass surfaces that refract the scene behind them, creating a realistic distortion effect.
Reflection Probes: Static cubemaps can be baked from any point in the world and applied to nearby geometry for accurate, parallax-corrected local reflections on PBR materials and water.
Procedural Skybox: A dynamic skybox system with procedural atmospheric scattering (Rayleigh & Mie) and animated clouds, removing the need for static 2D skybox images.

Post-Processing Stack

Includes a suite of configurable effects such as Film Grain, Chromatic Aberration, CRT screen curvature, Vignette, Sharpening, Black and White and Depth of Field.

Engine & World

Brush-Based World Construction: World geometry is built using classic CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) brush techniques, allowing for rapid and robust level design.
Advanced Particle System: Capable of emitting sprites with configurable properties like gravity, velocity, color-over-life, and size-over-life, loaded from simple .par definition files.
Physics Integration: Utilizes the Bullet Physics library for a robust simulation environment.
Collision Primitives: Supports player capsules, static triangle meshes, dynamic and static convex hulls.
Dynamic Objects: Brushes and models can be configured with mass to become fully dynamic physics objects.
Input/Output (I/O) Logic System: A powerful, trigger-based system inspired by Source's entity I/O allows for complex scripting and level interactivity without writing code. Entities can fire outputs (e.g., OnTrigger, OnTimer) which connect to the inputs of other entities (TurnOn, PlaySound).
Hierarchical Undo/Redo System: The integrated editor features a robust, multi-level undo/redo stack for all entity creation, deletion, and modification actions.

Platform & Tools

Cross-Platform Support: The engine and its tooling are built with modern CMake for compilation on Windows (32/64-bit, MSVC) and Linux (GCC).
In-Engine Editor: A comprehensive, real-time "Hammer-style" editor is built directly into the engine.
Multi-Viewport Editing: Features classic 3D perspective, top, side, and front 2D orthographic views.
CSG Tools: Includes tools for brush creation, clipping, and vertex manipulation.
Vertex Painting & Sculpting: Terrain and complex brushes can be directly painted with vertex colors for texture blending or sculpted for organic shapes.
Developer Console & CVars: A Quake-style dropdown console provides direct access to engine commands and tunable "CVars" for runtime configuration.

How to get running

Build the engine or get files from github runner After that copy all files from x64/release (contains base game files) into directory with the compiled dlls and exe, and then paste the dlls from x64_dlls (or x86 dlls if on 32 bit and linux if you are on linux) Run launcher.exe

Tech demos

Are in the playlist at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW7ec7Brk4oSenQSdZH5fZax2Hn5XUrUO

License

Only the following folders are under the main project license (MIT):

engine/
launcher/
x64/
Tools/
docs/

All other folders are third-party dependencies and fall under their respective open-source licenses.

Third-Party Libraries and Licenses

Folder	Library / Purpose	License
`glew-2.1.0/`	OpenGL Extension Wrangler	BSD 3-Clause
`imgui-master/`	Dear ImGui GUI Library	MIT License
`SDL2_image-2.8.8/`	SDL2 Image Addon	zlib License
`SDL2_ttf-2.24.0/`	SDL2 TrueType Font Addon	zlib License
`sdl/`	SDL2 Core	zlib License
`bullet/`	Bullet Physics	zlib License
`cgltf/`	GLTF Loader	MIT License
`mikktspace/`	Tangent Space Generator	zlib License
`minimp3/`	MP3 Decoder	Unlicense or MIT
`minivorbis/`	Ogg Vorbis Decoder	BSD-like
`embree-4.4.0/`	Ray Tracing Kernels (Intel Embree)	Apache 2.0 License
`oidn-2.3.3/`	Intel Open Image Denoise	Apache 2.0 License
`pl_mpeg/`	MPEG1 Video Decoder	MIT License
`openal-soft-1.24.3/`	Audio Library	LGPL 2.1
`stb/`	Image, Audio, and Font Utilities	Public Domain or MIT
`sentry/`	Crash Reporting SDK	MIT License
`fltk/`	Fast Light Toolkit GUI Library	LGPL

CodeLikeCXK/Tectonic-Engine