Mist Engine is a render engine made from scratch. The target of this project is to learn graphics programming and develop low level engine features, just for fun and learn. The project uses Vulkan API, SDL, ImGui, glm and others dependencies.
Execute GenerateProject.bat to create a sln file for Visual Studio 2022. If you use another version, edit bat file and change vs2022 for your current version. After that, build and run!
Nowadays, the engine implements the following features:
- Deferred rendering
- SSAO
- Shadow mapping
- Bloom post process
- Scene management
- Scene load and save from/to file
- PBR
- GLTF model loading
- System memory tracker
- Gpu memory tracker
- Shader reflection
- Shader include libraries
- Hot shader reload
- Compute shaders (wip)
- CPU and GPU profiling
- Tags for external GPU profiling tools (NSight, RenderDoc, PIX...)
- Line renderer for debugging
- CVar system
- Cfg files
First of all, we can change the workspace variable to point to our assets directory by the cmd line.
./bin/Release/Mist.exe -workspace:../../assets/
By the default the workspace is set to ../assets/ folder.
All the files that the engine will read or write must be in this directory. All paths are relative to this root.
The program can read a configuration file (.cfg) to set the CVars. The CVar system is implemented to configure several aspects of the engine behavior, such as initial resolution, show debug information, enable/disable some rendering techniques, etc... We can change this CVars before launch by cmd line (for example -workspace) or in a .cfg file (see ./assets/default.cfg). Besides, we can also set CVars in runtime by the engine console or with the CVar ImGui window. To open the runtime console, press º key.
On launch, the engine will load a scene file specified by g_LoadScene CVar. This is a .yaml file with the scene hierarchy, gltf models and more info (see ./assets/scenes/scene.yaml).
One powerfull feature is hot shader reloading. To reload shaders in runtime we can use the console command r_reloadshaders or the shortcut Ctrl+R.
To see all the CVars introduce this command in the console: cvarlist
To see all the command functions, run this: cmdlist.
Here are some features that I will develop from now on:
- Forward lighting+
- Material system
- IBL
- Render API to abstract engine from graphics API
- DX12 backend
- Improve compute shaders pipeline to use them in rendering pipeline
- SSR
- Skinning animation
- Capsule shadows
- Mesh LODs
- Job system
- Instance meshes
- Tesselation
- Terrains
- Lib project for custom data containers (wip)
- ...
- Vulkan API (https://www.vulkan.org/)
- glm (included in vulkan)
- SDL2 (included in vulkan)
- shaderc (included in vulkan)
- vma (https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/VulkanMemoryAllocator)
- yaml-cpp (https://github.com/jbeder/yaml-cpp)
- imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui)
- cgltf (https://github.com/jkuhlmann/cgltf)
- stb_image (https://github.com/nothings/stb)
- vkbootstrap (https://github.com/charles-lunarg/vk-bootstrap)
- premake (https://premake.github.io/)