Esoterica

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 provides a lot of the boring and time consuming boilerplate systems (reflection, serialization, resource management, math, etc...) as well as a tool framework allowing people to rapidly build their own tool/editors.

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.

Important Note: Stability

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.

Open Source Not Open Contribution

Esoterica is not a product and so there wont be any formal releases or versions. As such, we are not looking for any feature requests, nor are we looking for large PR contributions. Any feature requests or large PR will be rejected. That said, please feel free to create issues for bugs, clearly broken/incomplete pieces of code or for general questions.

Level Editing / Tooling / Import Pipeline

The level editing experience is intentionally barebones and rough. In our experience, level editing workflows and tools are incredibly subjective. There is no way to provide tools or workflows that will work for everyone. It will also go against the goal of Esoterica, which is to be a starting point for custom engine development. If a team wants to use Esoterica as a base we want to provide the simplest base for them to build whatever tooling they need for their team and their game.

We are providing some tools in a more polished form like the animation tools and ragdoll editor. This is because we believe that this area is a significantly less subjective field as the problem is better defined and constrained. This makes it easier to build tooling and guide folks down a specific tooling path.

The import pipeline is currently a bit rough from a front-end experience, this is being iterated and played with currently to see if we can find a balance between simplicity and the relatively painful importing other engines provide.

Documentation

As Esoterica is constantly being iterated and worked upon, it becomes hard to provide any documentation that isnt immediately out of date. Additionally, it becomes even less relevant for people forking it to build their own engine with. The code itself is heavily commented and written to be as readable as possible, this is how we intended to provide documentation moving forward.

We do have highlevel docs for the renderer here: https://docs.esotericaengine.com

And we have several presentations that cover the high level decisions regarding the entity model and the animation systems here: https://www.esotericaengine.com/docs

Help Needed: Sample Game

If really you do wish to contribute, we do need some help. 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:

• A technical animator to build out a locomotion and combat anim set.
• A technical character artist to build out some test characters, as well as help define the character tech pipelines (deformation, cloth, procedural bones).

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

What's included

• 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 - https://docs.esotericaengine.com
• Hybrid Actor/ECS object model - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjEsB611kxs
• AAA quality high performance animation system - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-T3Mk5oDHI - Used in multiple shipped games.
• Box3D integration and basic ragdoll tooling
• Basic editor infrastructure and tooling using DearImgui

Screenshots

Resource Pipeline	Basic Editor

Animation Graph	Ragdoll Editor

Requirements

• Visual Studio 2026 (18.6.1+)
• Windows 11
• External Dependencies - Available from the releases section

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.

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

   • Run the DownloadDependencies.bat script found in the root folder
   • Manually download the external dependencies archive and extract into the Esoterica root folder (X:/Esoterica Path/). You should end up with 'X:/Esoterica Path/External/'

2. Open the solution "Esoterica.sln"

3. 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.

4. Build the solution

Applications

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.

• Engine - this is the standalone Esoterica engine client
• Editor - This is the Esoterica editor
• Resource Server - This is a standalone application that will compile and provide resources to the various Esoterica applications
• Reflector - This generates the Esoterica reflection data
• Resource Compiler - This processes resource compilation requests
• Tester - Empty console app used for random testing

Third-party libraries

Esoterica would not exist without the open-source projects below. Third-party code remains under its own license, not the MIT license of the engine.

Runtime and data

Library	Used for	Project
EASTL + EABase	EA's STL replacement (TVector, TString, ...)	electronicarts/EASTL
rpmalloc	Lock-free, thread-caching general purpose allocator	mjansson/rpmalloc
EnkiTS	Task scheduler backing the engine's job system	dougbinks/enkiTS
moodycamel::ConcurrentQueue	Lock-free MPMC queues used by the threading layer	cameron314/concurrentqueue
rapidhash	Hashing (string IDs, resource paths)	Nicoshev/rapidhash
PCG	Random number generation (MathRandom)	imneme/pcg-cpp
mINI	INI file reading and writing for settings/config	metayeti/mINI
MPack	MessagePack (de)serialization	ludocode/mpack
pugixml	XML serialization of reflected types and resources	pugixml.org
LZAV	Compression of embedded payloads (fonts, generated data)	avaneev/lzav
STB	Image load/write/resize and font rasterization helpers	nothings/stb

Rendering and simulation

Library	Used for	Project
DirectXShaderCompiler (DXC)	HLSL 2021 to DXIL compilation	microsoft/DirectXShaderCompiler
D3D12MemoryAllocator	GPU memory suballocation for the DX12 backend	GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/D3D12MemoryAllocator
meshoptimizer	Mesh optimization, simplification and cluster generation	zeux/meshoptimizer
Box3D	Rigid body physics and ragdoll simulation	erincatto/box3d
AMD AGS	AMD driver extension query and device creation	GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/AGS_SDK
Freetype	Font rasterization for runtime and editor text	freetype.org
SMAA	Subpixel morphological anti-aliasing	iryoku/smaa
XeGTAO	Ground-truth ambient occlusion (GTAO)	GameTechDev/XeGTAO
Tony McMap Face	Filmic tonemapping LUT and evaluation	h3r2tic/tony-mc-mapface
FidelityFX Parallel Sort	GPU radix sort used by culling/compaction	GPUOpen-Effects/FidelityFX-ParallelSort
SHforHLSL	Spherical harmonics helpers in HLSL	TheRealMJP/SHforHLSL

Editor, tooling and import

Library	Used for	Project
Dear ImGui	Editor and debug UI	ocornut/imgui
ImPlot	Plotting in editor tooling	epezent/implot
LLVM + libclang	C++ parsing for reflection and code generation (Reflector)	llvm.org
ctt	BCn/ASTC texture compression (ResourceCompiler)	cwfitzgerald/ctt
ufbx	FBX import	ufbx/ufbx
cgltf	glTF import	jkuhlmann/cgltf
tinyexr	OpenEXR image import	syoyo/tinyexr
delabella	Delaunay triangulation for 2D blend spaces	msokalski/delabella
subprocess.h	Spawning out-of-process compilers and servers	sheredom/subprocess.h
SQLite	Resource compilation database	sqlite.org

Networking, profiling and debugging

Library	Used for	Project
GameNetworkingSockets	Reliable UDP networking	ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
IXWebSocket	WebSocket transport for networking and editor/server comms	machinezone/IXWebSocket
Optick	CPU profiling instrumentation	bombomby/optick
RenderDoc	Frame capture API integration	renderdoc.org
WinPixEventRuntime	PIX GPU event markers and captures	microsoft/PixEvents

Fonts and icons

Asset	Used for	Project	License
Roboto	UI font	fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto	Apache 2.0
Material Design Icons	Editor icon font and codepoint header	pictogrammers.com/library/mdi	Apache 2.0

The Material Design Icons header (Code/Base/Imgui/MaterialDesignIcons.h) was generated with juliettef/IconFontCppHeaders.

Commercial middleware

These packages are integrated behind preprocessor switches but are not distributed with the engine — you need your own license to enable them.

Middleware	Used for	Website
Live++	Live C++ hot-reload	liveplusplus.tech
Superluminal	CPU profiler integration	superluminal.eu
NavPower	Navigation mesh generation and pathfinding	navpower.com

Extra Info

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