AetherCore

Capabilities

• Render graph with bindless descriptors, buffer device address, and GPU-driven draw culling
• Tiled lighting with cascaded and local shadows, contact shadows, GTAO, and screen-space reflections
• Post-processing stack covering volumetric fog, bloom, depth of field, histogram auto-exposure, and a tonemapper with eight selectable operators
• Owner-authoritative multiplayer over ENet - network identity components, session state, and host-to-client and multicast RPCs callable from script
• Cheapest-first connect ladder of LAN broadcast, UPnP/NAT-PMP/PCP port mapping, STUN hole punching, rendezvous signalling, and opt-in TURN relay, with no port forwarding at any rung
• Editor-first 2D and 3D workflow with a standalone project Launcher, dockable viewport and inspectors, and linked prefab instances
• Authoring tools including sprite slicing, animation timelines, chunked tilemaps, a command-based undo system, and autosave with crash recovery
• Hot-reloadable .NET 10 C# gameplay SDK with collectible load contexts, inspector-exposed script fields, F5 rebuild, and one-click Visual Studio debugging
• Managed EditorGui immediate-mode API for writing editor tooling in C#
• Jolt 3D physics and Box2D 2D physics with ragdolls, character controllers, script-driven weld and rope constraints, and colliders generated from sprites and tilemaps
• Retained UI system with per-element custom shaders, inline rich-text effect spans, GPU curve text rendering, text editing, scrolling, and gamepad navigation
• Asset pipeline with glTF ingestion, freshness-checked project-wide baking, texture transcoding, material presets, zstd-compressed engine and project PAKs, and a virtual file system
• Diagnostics with Tracy CPU and GPU instrumentation, a frame timeline panel, tagged allocation tracking over mimalloc with a compile-time tracking ceiling, render-pass timings, and resource inspection
• Built-in MCP server so a coding agent can drive a live editor - managing panels, querying the render graph, capturing screenshots, and entering play mode

Verification and engineering notes

• Automated tests cover rendering, physics, scripting, assets, networking, and memory
• Static architecture checks and build-and-unit validation are complemented by local editor and runtime GPU smoke tests
• An automated GPU abstraction guard fails the build when engine code reaches past the abstraction into the Vulkan backend
• Immutable render-frame extraction keeps the render thread independent from mutable ECS state
• Per-tag allocation counters with a compile-time tracking ceiling; retail builds strip diagnostics
• Separate development, ship, and retail build policies keep diagnostics available without leaking them into release builds
• Windows and Linux build presets, with tagged releases producing a self-contained installer that needs no compiler or Vulkan SDK

Further decisions

• Designed the netcode so the owner of an entity simulates it - no round trip on your own input and no correction - and made connectivity degrade through a cheapest-first ladder so a game gets LAN play, NAT traversal, and relay fallback without a player ever forwarding a port.
• Treated the engine's own games as the acceptance test, building each subsystem against a project that needed it rather than against a demo scene.

Further outcomes

• Packaged editor builds support installation without a compiler, the Vulkan SDK, or the source repository.
• The Launcher and Editor can be driven and inspected programmatically for reproducible scene authoring, screenshots, diagnostics, and end-to-end validation.

Development workflow

AetherCore began as hand-written C++ and Vulkan. I define requirements, architecture boundaries, and acceptance criteria, then divide implementation work between agents using Oh my PI (omp) with multiple AI providers and Claude Code. I review the changes against the design and use automated tests, static architecture checks, the GPU abstraction guard, and local editor/runtime smoke tests to validate them before integration. The in-repository games provide practical acceptance cases for the engine's systems.