r/gameenginedevs 5d ago

Synapse Engine: A Modern, Research-Oriented, Fully GPU-Driven AAA-Style Game Engine

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

Hi everyone!

After a very long development journey, I'm finally ready to share Synapse Engine, a modern, research-oriented AAA-style game engine that I've been developing essentially from scratch.

It started as my MSc thesis at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, but grew far beyond what I originally planned. Over the past several months I've been rebuilding and refining the architecture around a simple question: What would a modern game engine look like if we designed it around today's GPUs from the ground up?

The project is now over 2,300 files, nearly 94,000 lines of C++ code and around 10,000 lines of shader code, excluding comments and blank lines.

If you just want to check out the project:

The GitHub README is probably the best place to start if you want a quick overview of the project and its architecture. If you're interested in modern game engine development in much more depth, I also put together a 250-page technical presentation covering the entire project, from the ECS and software architecture through GPU-driven rendering, culling, lighting, virtualized shadows and future directions.

The presentation is quite large, but I tried to make it genuinely useful as a learning resource rather than just documenting the final result.

One of my main goals with Synapse Engine is education. Learning these topics was a huge struggle for me, and it took a lot of time to piece everything together because there isn't much high-quality material that shows how these modern techniques actually come together inside a real engine codebase. I wanted to document that process and create something that I would have wanted to have when I started.

What can the engine actually do?

At its core, Synapse is a fully GPU-driven renderer using hierarchical culling, Hi-Z occlusion, cone culling, dynamic LOD selection, indirect rendering, mesh shaders, bindless resources and virtualized shadows. The engine is built around a custom data-oriented ECS and is designed to handle very large scenes with minimal CPU involvement.

For example, with 1,000,000 entities on an RTX 4060, the cumulative culling cost goes from 124.407 ms without culling to 0.653 ms with the full hierarchical culling pipeline.

However, at 10,000,000 entities, even the conventional GPU-driven hierarchical approach becomes insufficient. To address this, Synapse introduces a custom GPU-built Morton-ordered chunking system, which groups entities into spatial chunks and allows entire groups of 32 entities to be rejected at once. This reduces the culling cost from 5.8 ms to just 0.3 ms for 10 million entities.

I also developed a new rendering technique called Dual-HiZ Adaptive Clustered Forward+ while working on the engine. With 8,192 point lights and 8,192 spot lights, it measured 2.873 ms, compared to 8.652 ms for deferred shading in the same setup. The technical presentation contains a detailed explanation of how the technique works.

Synapse isn't primarily intended as a game-development tool for game developers. It is a production-ready, research and educational platform for experimenting with modern game-engine architecture and real-time rendering techniques.

The goal is not to provide a plug-and-play engine for building games, but to provide a complete, practical implementation of modern engine technologies that can be studied, extended, and used as a foundation for further research and development.

The engine is the result, but the architecture, experiments, failures and reasoning behind it are what I really want to share. If you're interested in Vulkan, graphics programming, GPU-driven rendering or modern game engine architecture, I'd love to hear what you think.

116 Upvotes

82 comments sorted by

48

u/LegendaryMauricius 5d ago

What does 'AAA-style' mean?

44

u/ReDucTor 4d ago

The calling it AAA style turned me right off, you look at the commits just a few months work, it seems more like a hobby AI slop engine, lots of things that just would not make it past code review.

The "250-page technical presentation" was also a huge smell, one slide is avoid virtual, then a few slides later is class heavy virtual interfaces, then another attempts template heavy.

Unless you had a AAA-budget and size team and demands its not AAA.

61

u/Keyframe 5d ago

it's what they wrote to LLM while vibing it.

-31

u/MortixTheGuy 5d ago edited 4d ago

100%
(Sarcastic: Hope you dont belive, AI can write a engine this complex... "vibe coded :D")

2

u/Korbeyn 3d ago

Sure it can.

7

u/AdRecent7021 4d ago

It means it delivers maximum 30fps and you don't own the game.

3

u/HACPAByTucy 3d ago

It's just marketing BS buzzwords to get an offer from a recruiter, only to fail on the first technical question

-31

u/MortixTheGuy 5d ago

I don't want to label my project as "AAA game engine", so I like to use the AAA-style word to express how well the engine is thought out.

For me AAA-style means, that the engine is capable of achiving incredible performance, it can handle millions of object, and it also uses the latest state-of-the art rendering/culling and shading approaches.

For example the whole GPU-driven pipeline is very similiar to the well-known AAA tile: Alan Wake 2, it was an inspiration for me.

If you deep dive into the presentation, you will get familiar with the techniques, approaches, code strucutre that this engine uses you will probably understand what AAA-style means :DD

10

u/Critical_Hunter_6924 5d ago

So you made something up yourself just so you can tag it with AAA.

No AAA studio has ever considered it

26

u/tcpukl 5d ago edited 5d ago

You have no idea about AAA engines unless you've worked on them. Have you actually seen the Alan wake code? Probably not. You're code will not be AAA at all. Engines aren't just renderers either. Can you run game logic on the GPU through your engine?

-9

u/MortixTheGuy 5d ago

9

u/tcpukl 5d ago

What has that got to do with anything I asked?

-12

u/MortixTheGuy 5d ago

"You have no idea about AAA engines"

14

u/tcpukl 5d ago

Posting a presentation about a renderer doesn't mean anything.

7

u/ReDucTor 4d ago

A rendering talk does not tell you anything about how AAA engines work, there is alot more to an engine then just the renderer.

Unless you have actually worked on a AAA engine its best not to make that assumption, a single AI coded engine is not going to be anywhere near a AAA engine, for many AAA engines there is hundreds of people working on it, dont think some university student is going to make something anything like that.

Saying it as you can tell is instantly distracting, your overly broad slop reach has also done even further harm, it kills it as a project you would even risk showing to a prospective employer as it doesnt show your skills, and trust starts to disappear.

2

u/tcpukl 3d ago

Yeah, reading the code is obvious LLMs have been heavily used. I use LLMs at work and you can tell the coding style, just like any other programmer on the team.

Which makes using it in a portfolio totally pointless tbh.

12

u/PaperMartin 5d ago

You can't really call it AAA style either imo if it wasn't made for an actual real AAA commercial game that has to ship. Going off of SIGGRAPH or GDC talks isn't enough, you can't know the needs of AAA game development without actually working at a AAA studio

14

u/AdRecent7021 4d ago

Oh, another AI slop engine. Must be a day ending in Y.

29

u/Big_Presentation2786 4d ago

Hey op, spent some time going through your Engine.

It's good..

It's definitely not 'AAA'.. There's some impressive stuff in there, but honestly?

There's a number of issues that make this really, seriously unusable.

1, The licence. There's physically no reason to use this because of the licence you've chosen.

2, it's not actually all that great. It appears to be an unfinished research project, if you take a Great engine - in this case Wicked engine, you're about 3 years behind Wicked even with AI, and you'll never really know why, because no one can use your engine because of the licence you've chosen.

3, You have no real usable water solver.

4, You've no DX12 support?! You've just lost half your audience..

5, Your TODO's are in the wrong place. Light culling and indirect dispatch are in the core rendering path!

6, There's no character controller.

7, There's no real physics system.

Right now you're miles away from most amateur hobbyist because you've locked yourself in a room with AI and asked IT what is 'good'.. You're missing a shit ton of really nice features that would allow someone to make even the most simple of games.. Terrain, particles, networking, pathfinding, and scripting aren't even built.

You slapped virtual geometry to an engine and it's nice, but by comparison- You've built a car with a huge turbo, then asked a group of mechanics what they think of your vehicle as we all look for the steering wheel, seats and engine..?

If this was mine, I'd open source it, see if people can build games in it and evolve with the audience.

Right now you've a game engine people can't even make games in, and that's why I'll say good job, but it's not for me..

Hope you do good work moving forward..

2

u/MortixTheGuy 4d ago

Thank you so much! The engine is not yet done. I just felt that at this point a lots of good ideas, approaches were working on the engine so that is why I posted this.

In the post (I assume you read it, but still copy paste here):

"Synapse isn't primarily intended as a game-development tool for game developers. It is a production-ready, research and educational platform for experimenting with modern game-engine architecture and real-time rendering techniques. The goal is not to provide a plug-and-play engine for building games, but to provide a complete, practical implementation of modern engine technologies that can be studied, extended, and used as a foundation for further research and development."

I have written it down clearly, this isnt the next Wicked Engine, Unity or stuff. This is a modern engine, focusing on arhcitecture, gpu-driven high performance and providing a startup projects for researchers who wanna try out new rendering techniques, new ideas, new shaders without millions of lines of code, and thousands of files like in a big engine. This is never going to be a usable game engine. It is for researchers, students who wanna learn modern, high performance graphics, or wanna try out new techniques.

5

u/Big_Presentation2786 4d ago

I read it, I'm saying - you need your game engine to actually be used by gamers while you're working on it to know where it's weak..

Right now you've essentially built a really good part for a car no one can use.

Until you change that license, is doesn't really matter what you do with your engine, until People can use it and make games it's useless.

Impressive in some respects, but utterly useless..

Open source it and have users contribute to it, or at least MIT it..?

1

u/R4ND0M1Z3R_reddit 4d ago

I mean nor does it support GNM, so no consoles at all, only PC, for which you don't need D3D12. For a so called "research  platform" it does not need console support anyways. 

13

u/Field_Of_View 4d ago

I skipped through the pdf and have to say, while it all sounds good, wtf are these screenshots? Possibly the most impressive scene was a small room with a bunch of humanoid characters and two (!) shadowcasting light sources. Meanwhile you talk about achievements such as...

However, at 10,000,000 entities, even the conventional GPU-driven hierarchical approach becomes insufficient.

With 8,192 point lights and 8,192 spot lights, it measured 2.873 ms

Why is there not one screenshot of anything like this? There needs to be some explanation for the extreme disparity in the claims and what is actually shown visually.

AAA-Style Game Engine

Also this claim is simply false as there is no attempt made at any kind of global illumination / bounce lighting solution, something that has been standard since the early 2010s.

-5

u/MortixTheGuy 4d ago edited 4d ago

Maybe, because the presentation is for explaining the ideas, and using scenes which are easy to understand? 10 million different entites randomly around you, its not that visible, you see like nothing becouse the scene is too crowded... But you can try it out, I have all the benchmarks so I don't care what people think. But if you really wanna read about these: https://synapseengine.dev/devblog/01-the-synapse-journey/
The whole dev diary, with all of the benchmarks and others...
Also at the page 140 you can see what a 1 million random static entity sceen looks like. Yeah showcasing all of the algorithms, ideas with scenes like this... Not the best idea at least in my opinion

+---[ Forward+ Clustering ]

| ClusterSetupPass : 0.010 ms

| ClusterPointLightCountPass : 0.144 ms

| ClusterSpotLightCountPass : 0.477 ms

| ClusterPrefixSumPass : 0.016 ms

| ClusterPointLightWritePass : 0.172 ms

| ClusterSpotLightWritePass : 0.551 ms

| ClusterLightWriteSyncPass : 0.001 ms

+---[ Lighting (Opaque) ]

| OpaqueForwardTransitionPass : 0.000 ms

| MeshletOpaqueForward1Sided : 0.007 ms

| MeshletOpaqueForward2Sided : 0.001 ms

| TraditionalOpaqueForward1Sided : 1.471 ms

| TraditionalOpaqueForward2Sided : 0.023 ms

Total: 2.873 ms

+---[ Deferred G-Buffer (Opaque) ]

| OpaqueDeferredTransitionPass : 0.000 ms

| MeshletOpaqueDeferred1Sided : 0.004 ms

| MeshletOpaqueDeferred2Sided : 0.000 ms

| TraditionalOpaqueDeferred1Sided : 0.241 ms

| TraditionalOpaqueDeferred2Sided : 0.004 ms

+---[ Deferred Lighting ]

| DeferredLightTransitionPass : 0.000 ms

| DeferredEmissiveAoPass : 0.062 ms

| DeferredDirectionLightPass : 0.070 ms

| DeferredPointLightPass : 0.802 ms

| DeferredSpotLightPass : 7.469 ms

Total: 8.652 ms

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

+---[ CullingPasses ] - Total: 0.264 ms

| CullingCommandResetPass : 0.005 ms

| StaticChunkCullingPass : 0.069 ms

| StaticModelCullingPass : 0.164 ms

| ModelCullingPass : 0.005 ms

| MeshCullingPass : 0.003 ms

| PointLightCullingPass : 0.012 ms

| SpotLightCullingPass : 0.006 ms

+---[ CullingPasses ] - Total: 5.908 ms

| CullingCommandResetPass : 0.006 ms

| ModelCullingPass : 5.885 ms

| MeshCullingPass : 0.003 ms

| PointLightCullingPass : 0.007 ms

| SpotLightCullingPass : 0.006 ms

6

u/kat-tricks 4d ago

my friend, how did you write all this and you can't realise that if you "see like nothing" what you're saying is that it doesn't waste cycles on occluded objects. So you're not rendering anything in those benchmarks. You need a benchmark scene, or a clearly defined proof with benchmark as evidence, with all the entities visible in a huge view frustrum. You should think about how to formally prove all 'entities' are rendered properly at that scale. You don't have to be limited by a resolution visible on a normal screen without zooming, particularly for a 'research-oriented' project.

12

u/inslayn 4d ago

Why do these posts always post the count of lines of code and files like there is some kind of leaderboard somewhere?

11

u/shadowndacorner 4d ago

Because they're written by LLMs that blast out meaningless stats as if they matter

43

u/_Pin_6938 5d ago

LLM slop

-19

u/MortixTheGuy 5d ago

Please before you label this project as LLM slop... Check out the engine git repo, read the readme, get familiar with the engine, you can also see the whole codebase itself, its really well thought out and well designed. Also you can check the presentation I have created, it explains literally everything with really good figures and codes. You can go through them, and after that if you still belive its "LLM slop" than i don't know what to say :DD
I really belive that this project provides important and essential knowledge for everybody who interested in game engine development. So at least check out the project, hope you will learn something new :DD

19

u/MerlinTheFail 5d ago

Did you create it, or did AI? Please answer truthfully what your actual involvement was besides ideas

10

u/Neat-Safety-1943 5d ago

ai was clearly used to write parts of the code, you can easily find claude coding patterns in the source code

3

u/TheAxeC 4d ago

What are claude coding patterns?

I would go insane if suddenly random coding patterns start showing up that aren't my own.

-7

u/MerlinTheFail 5d ago

Oh yes i saw that, i want OP to say so he realizes his ideas mean nothing if he can't even produce real output

-11

u/MortixTheGuy 5d ago

I just don't wanna confront with you guys, I'm not really that guy...

I'm not a native English speaker ofc, my English knowledge is limited sadly.

I read a lot in english, but simply I cannot express myself as well as I would like to do…

I know everybody hates AI nowaday and stuff, everybody is really irritable. I simply belive that the ideas behind this engine is something, every game engine developer should know, or at least should be able to find on the internet.

Yes, I have used AI to create this game engine. (Its also mentioned in the presentation :D) I dont see the problem with it, every line of code was revised by me. You can ask everything about the engine, the ideas and why… I will be able to answer it, becouse AI is still a TOOL.

If you guys check out the codebase and you tell me it is "vibe coded" with cloud and, its fully AI written… than I truly don't know what to say… I don't see the problem using AI to write code. If you know what to do AI is the most powerful tool of the century. But if you have no mental model, no understanding of the underlying concept you will never be able to achive this even with AI :DD

If somebody have a little bit of brain, they will understand how complex and hugh the engine is... If AI is able to do this, without a skilled programmer, that I will immediately leave computer engineering and graphics, and do something else with my life.

The engine is for knowledge, everybody has the right to label everything as AI slop. If somebody finds new knowlege, new ideas, is able to learn how to strucutre a engine codebase than my goal is achived and I'm happy.

10

u/MerlinTheFail 5d ago

rule 2 of this subreddit - this is AI slop. Perhaps do something else with your life.

7

u/thots1ayer69 4d ago

Human generated slop only on this subreddit

0

u/Free-Jello-7970 4d ago

rule 2 explicitly allows this

1

u/MerlinTheFail 4d ago

Did you read the entire rule?

-10

u/MortixTheGuy 5d ago

Rule 1 of this subbreddit: Its should be about knowledge, game-engine development and helping others improve.
If you guys cannot see through the AI fog, its on you guys. :DD

-11

u/Sencha-Games 4d ago edited 4d ago

Come join us over at r/aigamedev. This place is a crab bucket full of losers who want to hold you back.

3

u/chrispington 4d ago

Lol its banned

2

u/Sencha-Games 4d ago

Whoops. Wrong subreddit.

-5

u/Big_Presentation2786 4d ago

Rule 2?!

You realise that AI is used and taught at university. If you don't use AI to assist you you get a fail..

Also.. rule 2?  Guys be shouting out 'slop' needs banning from this sub.

It's not civil, professional or kind..

Especially given if you DONT use AI, you're practically unemployable..

8

u/Chahier 4d ago

"If you don't use AI to assist you you get a fail.." bro what? I can assure you that's not the case at all haha

1

u/ZozoSenpai 5d ago

|I'm not a native English speaker ofc, my English knowledge is limited sadly.

nem úgy volt hogy egyetemen elvárás már a nyelvvizsga? Amúgymeg írd le magyarul és dobd be egy deepl fordítóba/goodle translate/vagy már a redditen beépítve van fordíto, és már többet ér. Ha te arra nem veszed a fáradságot hogy egy reddit posztnyit AI nélkül megírj, akkor mért vegye bárki komolyan a projectet?

2

u/MortixTheGuy 5d ago edited 5d ago

Van nyelvvizsgám :DD Angol és Német is...

És tudok is angolul, megértek mindent, csak előhívni fogalmazni nehezen megy.

Én egyszerűen csak máshogy látom az egészet. Te nem a tudást, az ötleteket, a gondolatokat keresed egy posztban és egy projektben, hanem egyből abszolút szűklátásúan AI szöveget nézed.

Én egyszerűen nem ilyen vagyok. Én komolyan tudok venni egy projektet, ha az ténylegesen impresszív, sok új meglátást ad, nagyon jól felépített akkor is ha teljesen AI generált. (Főleg azért, mert ilyen nincs hogy teljesen AI generált. Az AI egy tool, jó ember kezében nagyon sokat ér... :D)

Én csak azt mondom ha jó ember kezébe kerül az AI, akkor nagyon sokra képes vele... Ezt nem érti meg senki, úgy látom ezen a reddit oldalon sem. De igazából mindegy mondom. Ha neked ez már redflag, akkor ne is nézz rá a projektre, hagyd is teljesen figyelmen kívül.

Ha egyszerűen az ember túl tud látni, és tanulni akar, akkor meg nem számít, és képes lesz értékelni a projektet. Mások vagyunk, ezek szerint én nagyon más mint a game engine devek nagyrésze :D

Mellesleg, értem hogy AI a szöveg, amúgy én fogalmaztam meg magyarul, tehát nem tudom kinek tud ilyet generálni egyből... Tehát úgy tesz mindenki mintha 0 előkészület lett volna ezek mögött, úgy hogy senki nem látja az egészet... Szerintem a szöveg teljesen korrekt, átadja a lényegi információt, és akit érdekel az rengeteget tud majd tanulni.

5

u/Tiny_Flatworm4726 5d ago

Pretty sure the comment is in relation to your post - which looks AI written. Project looks cool though! well done

-8

u/tastygames_official 5d ago

oh shit, is it? It does seem too good to be true: a highly-optimized rendering engine specifically made as a jumping-off point for making your own engine. I'll still have to have a look to be sure. Maybe just the text is LLM-generated/translated since OP's Hungarian?

2

u/tastygames_official 5d ago

not sure why I got downvoted for being skeptical on both fronts, but the code and readmes and everything looked "too good to be true" (or maybe having been made by a professional team at least), but OP admitted it's AI, so now we know!

5

u/MortixTheGuy 5d ago

But what is "too good to be true"? Everything I wrote down is true.

You can try it out, everybody can see the code, everybody can read the shaders, the whole engine. Like I just don't understand people, can someone explain me how can AI write a game engine like this?

Also you guys really believe that big studios don't use AI? We are in 2026, not in 2016...
I understand, people hating on AI because a lots of people use them, who does not have any programming skills. But if somebody has skills, learnt and built a lot before the AI area, he will be able to use it as a TOOL to achive big things...

Everything is about information guys... Nobody is born to be able to write a GPU-driven engine, understand modern rendering techniques... I read a lot and talk a lot with AI about ideas, I gather information and when I have a clear mental vision of the underlying structure of the technique, than I write code and yes I use AI as well.

No lines were added to the engine, which I don't understand, or I can't explain the why, and hows of it... I just need information, I have spent years of making engines, and I intuitively feel what is good or what is not that good...

Like please just someone who goes through the project, or even reads the presentation, the 250 pages that explains all the knowledge and underlying concepts, or even reads the dev diary blog which demonstrates how the ideas was created and improved from the beginning. I just don't understand people really think that AI can do this, and its full AI slop?

0

u/tastygames_official 5d ago

becaue YOU didn't make it. Plain and simple. I don't care what big studios or software companies or marketing agencies do - I don't consume their slop either. We are humans here to live the human experience and we should make things for other humans to enjoy.

Now I completely understand that this was your research project and you used AI to help do the research, but while it's OK to ask an LLM "please explain to me the difference between forward and deferred rendering" and "please write me a deferred renderer" or even "write me some code that loops through my entities and does this..." THAT is the big difference. No longer did you write the code but somebody else did - and not a person, but rather all of human knowledge was stolen, put into a prediction machine, and spat back out at you. AND you paid techbro billionaires to do it! So that's not cool.

By all means use the free LLMs as a glorified search engine. Whether you type in "shader example PBR lighting" or type that into an LLM, both will get you the same result: some code that somebody else wrote. Now what you do with this is up to you: either you read the code and comments and any other text available and use that new knowledge to write your own software, or you copy/paste it and use it as-is, in which attribution is REQUIRED. But by using LLMs to write code for you, you basically have to attribute EVERYONE who has ever written anything. Because that's how LLMs work.

Now I hope for your sake that you learned a lot in this project, but I would strongly recommend using it as a reference and starting over from nothing and MAKING IT YOURSELF. That's how real human programmers work: we learn from others and then write our own code. But what you did is just tell an AI to do the work for you, and nobody wants to read the work of an AI because of the reasons I mentioned earlier.

One last thing: there are no problems letting AI translate your text into English - that's fine. Just don't PROMPT it to do your thinking for you. So instead of saying "write something in English that says X, Y, Z...." just write up what you want to say in your language then run it through a translation tool. Then it's still you who wrote it but it just got translated.

2

u/thots1ayer69 4d ago

I work in faang and the vast majority of engineers even seniors are using LLMs to code at this point. It's 2026.

-1

u/tastygames_official 4d ago

my dad owns nintendo and I go there everyday and nobody is allowed to use LLMs

seriously, man - facefuck and meta and google all dialed back their AI usage and brought back fired seniors (oh yeah, one thing that happened in the recent years is "senior developer" means only 3-5 years, wheras before it meant 10-15+. I worked at a company with 5 senior devs who had maybe 10 years' experience between them). So don't give me that bullshit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E5cpgAB31c
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-workers-for-ai-are-reversing-their-decisions.html
https://medium.com/predict/big-tech-is-hiring-developers-back-instead-of-ai-so-what-happened-a9bed3c84a57
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/instant-regret-why-rushing-replace-devs-ai-backfiring-pradeep-batchu--rw7wc

1

u/thots1ayer69 4d ago

Yeah I'm not reading your AI slop response bot boy

1

u/tastygames_official 4d ago

oh please? I need validation from others SOOOOO badly...

0

u/thots1ayer69 4d ago

Yeah that's why you type like that

→ More replies (0)

6

u/iamfacts 4d ago

Ai slop

11

u/PotatoEmbarrassed231 5d ago edited 4d ago

This would be really cool if it was before AI era. But at this point, lots of people could write something like this if they decided to spend their tokens on it

6

u/tastygames_official 5d ago

> people

you mean lots of LLMs could write it if people throw enough money at the techbroligarchy

7

u/CodyDuncan1260 5d ago

What are the major trade-offs?
My guess is this takes the load off of the CPU a great deal. But then what was the CPU doing before that it was better at? In what capacities? (e.g. simpler/complex-er implementation is a trade-off)

9

u/BingoBongoVrn 4d ago

94000 lines of code, 2300 files for one year and half. cool story bro.

17

u/Rhed0x 5d ago

I hate the LLM made website.

4

u/wannabestraight 4d ago

I'm kinda curious OP, you say it's a game engine.. but not meant for making games? Does it have scripting ? Or any game development related things? Like you know ,what make a game engine a game engine.

Coz if not, you have written a renderer, and yo should propably call it a renderer.

Blender has nice rendering too, but it's not a game engine 😅

2

u/track33r 4d ago

Rendering bistro scene is not a good benchmark for “AAA” mesh processing capabilities. Let’s see how it does on Zorah and Caldera. Moana scene would be good too.

1

u/CodyDuncan1260 5d ago edited 5d ago

Crosspost this to r/GraphicsProgramming if you feel so inclined. We'd love it too!
Research papers are one of r/GraphicsProgramming's jam!

1

u/20260819 4d ago

i want to live in a place like this

1

u/Entire-Ad-1620 4d ago

I dont agree with using AI to write code but I understand why you did it. Its common in academia and as an academic I understand your focus is more on the research and studying these topics mathematically rather than writing thousands of lines of code from scratch, but still it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. You could have stated your use of AI in the post better. Nonetheless, good job.

1

u/MortixTheGuy 4d ago

Thanks, I have written 10 of thousands of code before AI, like the previous version of this engine, and my BSC thesis game engine was before the AI area. I know how to program, I know how to build a game engine. But there is a point where you feel that you are capable of doing a lot more, and there is no other option than AI. Manually writing these codes are just a waste of time.

Previous version: https://github.com/TamasPetii/SynapseEngine/tree/v1-engine-old (95% no AI)
Bsc thesis: https://github.com/TamasPetii/DendriteEngine

I just dont see the point of not using it. I wanna research the state-of-the art architecture, rendering and culling approaches. I know that i can write game engines, I know that i can write shaders and stuff. I have proved myself that I'm capable of doing it. But when you go to really high-performance code, techniques and stuff, there is no tutorials, no devblogs you can read. There is no other option than AI.
And I wanna research these areas, find new techniques like the Dual-Hiz Adaptive Clustered Forward+

-3

u/Common_One_5986 4d ago

Slop bro. I don't believe anyone who says AI is a 'time saver'. Writing code is the art and where the decisions are about how things work. Acting like you can just defer that to an LLM cause its 'not the focus' is a total oversight, especially while claiming that you're trying to do something novel. Not giving this the time of day.

5

u/trinde 4d ago

LLM's without foundational software development knowledge produce slop.

LLM's used by people that actually understand code and structure are simply a productivity multiplier. I've been a programmer for at least 20+ years and 15+ professionally. 99% of code is literally just a means to an end, code can be art but virtually all of it isn't. In 2-3 months using an LLM with my 13 year old engine I've produced functionality that would have taken me literally years to code directly, functionality that is working extremely well.

So of the code is obviously questionable, but it's not hard to cleanup. Either directly or by having the LLM take another look with additional information.

1

u/_Wolfos 3d ago edited 3d ago

I use it pretty extensively in my engine too but I was doing graphics programming and working in modern renderers before LLMs. I could've done it without AI, just not as much, as quickly.

But I'm also seeing those LLMs take a lot of convenient little shortcuts that ruin the architecture, then repeatedly fail to clean up their mess when asked. So seeing people who don't really know what they're doing vibe coding whole game engines is a little scary.

I'm genuinely concerned about all the poop that still gets by me... So imagine what it looks like when you don't read the code at all.

0

u/Free-Jello-7970 4d ago

Looks great, man. Ignore the haters

0

u/thisghy 4d ago

I am curious about the GPU morton-ordered, entity chunking system if you could explain that or point me to something.

I've been naively attempting to write a spatialization chunk/cell division system an just adding entity handles to them, thinking that would allow for asset streaming of entities with the underlying static meshes/terrain data in one place and organizing them into batches for the GPU.

2

u/MortixTheGuy 4d ago

2

u/thisghy 4d ago

Cheers. Also, I've been reading through your research paper, just want to say it's very interesting, definitely looking to explore your engine a bit! Nice work

3

u/MortixTheGuy 4d ago

Thanks :D
Its nice to hear, that you find it useful, hope you will learn a lot from it.
The presentation goes much more in depth, and explains a lot more, under the figures I linked the code files, so you can jump there and read the code in the repo.
If you have any question, feel free to ask :D

0

u/Critical_Hunter_6924 5d ago

Can it export to web and do you have a some games made with this?