POIESIA

Vulkan & OpenGL
from scratch.

Dual-backend rendering with Vulkan as the primary path and OpenGL as the fallback. Forward and deferred pipelines, PBR materials, shadow mapping, and post-processing — all written from scratch, no middleware.

Dual rendering backend

Vulkan for modern GPUs with explicit memory management and multi-threaded command buffers. OpenGL 4.5 fallback for broader hardware support. Switch at launch.

PBR material system

Physically-based rendering with metallic-roughness workflow. Albedo, normal, metallic, roughness, AO, and emissive maps. Runtime shader compilation with hot-reload.

2D and 3D

Full 3D scene rendering with perspective cameras, plus a dedicated 2D sprite renderer with atlas support, batching, and pixel-perfect rendering for 2D games.

Post-processing stack

Bloom, tone mapping, FXAA, SSAO, and color grading. Configurable per-camera with a scriptable render pipeline.

Entity-component
system.

Data-oriented ECS at the core. Entities are IDs, components are plain data in contiguous arrays, systems iterate over component queries. Cache-friendly, parallelizable, and simple to extend.

Archetype-based storage

Components with the same layout are stored together in dense arrays. Iteration is a linear memory scan. Adding or removing components moves the entity between archetypes.

System scheduling

Systems declare their component dependencies. The scheduler runs independent systems in parallel on a thread pool. Explicit ordering constraints when needed.

Scene graph

Parent-child transform hierarchy on top of the ECS. Local and world transforms update in a single traversal pass. Attach, detach, and reparent at runtime.

Serialization

Scenes serialize to a binary format and a human-readable text format. Load, save, and hot-reload scenes during development. Prefab system for reusable entity templates.

Simulate
and listen.

Rigid body physics

Integrated physics with collision detection (AABB, sphere, convex hull, mesh), rigid body dynamics, joints, and raycasting. Fixed timestep with interpolation.

Spatial audio

3D positional audio with distance attenuation, doppler, and reverb zones. Supports WAV, OGG, and MP3. Listener follows the active camera. Multiple simultaneous sources.

Asset pipeline

Import glTF 2.0, OBJ, FBX models. Texture compression to GPU formats at build time. Asset hot-reload during development — change a texture and see it update live.

Input system

Unified input handling for keyboard, mouse, and gamepad. Action mapping with rebindable keys. Supports multiple controllers for local multiplayer.

Visual
scene editor.

A built-in editor for placing entities, adjusting properties, and previewing your game in real time. Not a separate application — the editor is the engine running in edit mode.

Scene viewport

3D viewport with translate, rotate, and scale gizmos. Grid snapping, multiple cameras, and wireframe/solid/textured render modes.

Entity inspector

Select any entity and edit its components in a property panel. Add, remove, and configure components with immediate visual feedback in the viewport.

Asset browser

Browse, preview, and drag-and-drop assets directly into the scene. Thumbnail previews for textures, meshes, and audio files.

Play-in-editor

Hit play and the game runs inside the editor viewport. Pause, step frame-by-frame, and inspect entity state mid-game. Stop and the scene reverts to its saved state.

The stack.

• C++20
• VULKAN
• OPENGL 4.5
• GLSL
• GLFW
• GLM
• IMGUI
• GLTF 2.0
• CMAKE
• ENTT

Free.

Poiesia is free. No subscription, no royalties, no restrictions on what you ship with it. Use it for anything.

Terms