Flex Engine

2017-Present

• C++, Vulkan

Flex Engine is a personal game engine I began work on in February 2017. I use it as a playground for learning about real-time techniques. You can find the source here: github.com/ajweeks/FlexEngine

Notable Features

• Vulkan backend
• Conditional checksum-based shader compilation
• Support for Windows & linux
• Scene editor with serialization
• In-game scripting language & virtual machine
• Built-in profiling capture/inspection tools
• Rendering:
  • Physically based shading model
  • Image based lighting
  • Screen-space ambient occlusion
  • Stable cascaded shadow mapping
  • Temporal anti-aliasing
  • Signed-distance field font generation & rendering
  • GPU particles

A view of the editor tools showing info about scenes, objects, materials, lights, and user-settings

Basic implementation of Cascaded Shadow Mapping

Two million particles updated and rendered entirely on the GPU, utilizing the compute stage

Profiler overlay showing a breakdown the CPU-time of a single frame

Some of the editor windows

Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)

GBuffer (top-left to bottom-right): position, albedo, normal, final image, depth, metallic, AO, roughness

The effect different environment maps have on the same model when using image-based lighting

See more screenshots here

Acknowledgments

A huge thank you must be given to the following individuals and organizations for their incredibly useful resources:

• Baldur Karlsson of github.com/baldurk/renderdoc
• Alexander Overvoorde of vulkan-tutorial.com
• Sascha Willems of github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan
• Joey de Vries of learnopengl.com
• Andrew Maximov for the pistol model and textures artisaverb.info/PBT.html
• FreePBR.com for the high-quality PBR textures
• All authors and contributors to the open-source libraries mentioned above

Blog

Stay (somewhat) up to date about this project on my blog at ajweeks.com/blog