Esoterica: Prototype Game Engine

Esoterica Engine is an MIT licensed prototype game engine framework. It’s intended for use either as a proprietary engine starter pack, a technology demonstrator, an educational tool or an R&D framework. The goal of Esoterica is to provide a solid and robust starting point for folks that are looking to build their own tech or transition off of existing tech. It provide a lot of the boring and time consuming boilerplate work (reflection, serialization, resource management, math, etc...) as well a simple to extend tool framework allowing people to rapidly build their own tools.

Esoterica is NOT an off the shelf game engine that you can just take and work with. It is intended for technical teams that have the ability to extend and build upon it.

Esoterica is a prototype engine that's being developed in our spare time and as such there will likely be bugs and crashes (primarily with the tooling side). It is not intended as a stable production tool. If you encounter any crashes or bugs, please file issues and we'll try to get to them as soon as we can.

Esoterica is not a product, there will not be any formal releases or versions.As such we are not looking for any feature request, nor are we looking for large PR contributions. Any feature requests or large PR will be rejected. That said, please feel free to create issue on bugs, broken/incomplete sections or for questions or intended uses, etc...

We are looking for folks to help us build out a simple sample game that we can include with the project. We are looking for the following:

More details can be found here: https://www.esotericaengine.com/contribute

Basic core of a game engine (serialization, math, string handling, logging, etc...) Libclang based c++ reflection and code-generation Compiler based resource system with hot-reloading Hybrid Actor/ECS object model - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjEsB611kxs AAA quality high performance animation graph system - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-T3Mk5oDHI&t=5427s - Used in multiple shipped games. Basic animation compression Powered Ragdoll implmentation using Box3D Basic editor infrastructure and tooling using DearImgui Screenshots Resource Pipeline Basic Editor Animation Graph Ragdoll Editor Requirements Visual Studio 2026 (18.6.1+) Building Esoterica Esoterica uses vanilla msbuild for its build system. There are a set of property sheets that control all the build settings for Esoterica in the "code/property sheets" folder.

Get the external dependencies set up: there are two ways to do this:

Manually rebuild the "Esoterica.Scripts.Reflect" project (under the "0. Scripts" solution folder) - this will generate all the required Esoterica reflection code needed for the project to compile.

Easiest way to get started, is just set the "Esoterica.Applications.Editor" as the startup project and hit run. If you want to run the engine, use the "Esoterica.Applications.Engine" project with the "-map data://path_to_map.map" argument.

EASTL DearImgui EnkiTS iniparser PCG rapidhash rpmalloc concurrentqueue MPack Game Networking Sockets ixwebsocket Box3D ufbx cgltf pfd sqlite subprocess optick meshoptimizer ctt D3D12MemoryAllocator STB LZAV pugixml rapidhash delabella tinyexr Freetype LLVM SMAA TonyMcMapFace GTAO These middleware packages are also integrated but require a license to use (so they are disabled by default)

If you use the SmartCommandLineArguments plugin for VS then there are supplied saved arguments to help you start the engine.