
Lightning Engine
A downloadable game engine for Windows
Lightning Engine is a 3D game engine and editor built from scratch. It ships with a feature-rich desktop editor for authoring scenes, materials, assets and more.
It's in active beta. Everything listed below works today; what's next is on the roadmap further down.
Rendering
- Physically based rendering (PBR) with metallic & roughness components
- Image-based lighting (IBL) with diffuse and specular prefiltering
- HDRI skyboxes and ambient reflection
- Normal mapping with tangent space (MikkTSPace)
- Directional, point and spot lights
- Light culling optimized to support 64k+ lights at 60fps on mid-range hardware
- DirectX 12 renderer; Vulkan is in progress
Editor
- Scene management - create, rename, enable/disable entities
- Entity Component System (ECS): Transform, Script, Geometry
- Renderer viewport (multiple viewports supported)
- Visual Studi integration (with MSBuild)
- Developer console & change history
- Drag-and-drop FBX import for static meshes
- Texture import with BC block compression and texture grouping
- Geometry & texture inspector
Which download do I need?
- Lightning-Setup.exe - recommended. Installs the engine and every dependency for you.
- Lightning-Installer.msi - if you already have Visual Studio or the VS Build Tools installed
- lightning-engine-v?.?.?.zip - manual install, for people who like to do it themeselves
Whats next?
| Planned | In progress... | Included in next release |
|---|---|---|
| Removing components | ||
| Camera entity | ||
| Viewport tools: move, rotate, scale | ||
| Vulkan API | ||
| DirectX 11 | ||
| OpenGL | ||
| Supporting lights in editor | ||
| Running the game from the editor |
Changelog is included with every build (Changelog.md)
Stats
| language | files | lines |
|---|---|---|
| C# | 228 | 18.3k |
| C++ | 108 | 17.2k |
| XAML | 41 | 9.36k |
| XML | 30 | 2.22k |
| HLSL | 15 | 1.98k |
| Markdown | 5 | 517 |
| Python | 8 | 277 |
| YAML | 3 | 265 |
| ... +2 others (less than 100 lines) |
If Lightning Engine is useful to you, or you just enjoy watching an engine grow in the open, a tip goes straight into more development. No pressure either way.
Licensed under the Lightning Engine Software License Agreement (see LICENCE.md).
This software contains Autodesk® FBX® SDK code developed by Autodesk, Inc.
Copyright 2008 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.
| Published | 1 day ago |
| Status | In development |
| Category | Tool |
| Platforms | Windows |
| Author | CsBalint |
| Tags | 3D, Cats, Game engine, Indie, lightning-engine, PBR (Physically Based Rendering), User Interface (UI) |
| Content | No generative AI was used |
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:






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