The Esoterica game engine isn’t for everyone… it says it right there in the name:
It is a C++ based based free and open source game engine by Steam employee Bobby Anguelov with a renderer by Kirill Bazhenov, both game developers with several shipped titles under their belts. The intended purposes of the Esoterica engine are:
- A technology demonstrator
- A starting point for developing your own engine
- Research and Development
- Educational Purposes
This part, from the GitHub repository is very important:
We need to be clear that 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.
So, this is clearly meant as a building block for creating your own engine, for doing experiments or as a learning experience, not for production use. There is minimal documentation and if you aren’t able to read source code, there is really nothing here for you. If you are however, or want to see an engine under the hood, Esoterica Engine offers a hell of an opportunity.
Features of Esoterica Engine:
- 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
- Modern bindless DX12 renderer
- Hybrid Actor/ECS object model
- AAA quality high performance animation system – Used in multiple shipped games. (Learn More)
- Box3D integration and basic ragdoll tooling
- Basic editor infrastructure and tooling using DearImgui
Key Links
Esoterica Engine GitHub Repository
You can learn more about Esoterica Engine and see the editor briefly in action, in the video below.