helmer  

A performant, flexible, extensible, scalable foundation for creation; featuring a robust render graph and thoughtful architecture, allowing completely custom logic integrations. multiple logic integrations are provided.

Massively scalable runtime/collection of tooling masquerading as a game engine

💬 Discord server 💬 Stoat server

Features

• multiplatform
• large scale hardware/driver support
• performant multithreading
• powerful ECS integrations [bevy_ecs, custom, etc..]
• "bring your own logic" approach providing callbacks to implement a custom logic paradigm
• rapier3D physics integration
• beautiful provided graph templates/passes
  • default/raster graph
    • SSGI
    • SSR
    • physically based sky [LUT based]
    • cascaded EVSM shadows [PCF]
    • etc..
  • hybrid graph
    • DDGIR
  • traced graph
    • monte-carlo path tracer
    • robust, scalable optimizations to accomidate real time performance
• right handed +Y-up coordinate system
• highly capable, scalable, robust render graph
• legacy monolithic renderers: deferred bindless renderer, forward per-material uniforms renderer, forward texture array renderer
• robust, low-overhead, massively scalable asset streaming to accomidate worlds of any scale/complexity
• frustum+occlusion culling
• LOD/cpu&gpu mip/meshlet/BLAS/TLAS generation
• non-blocking, highly threaded, deferred asset loading/processing/derivative generation
• anti-blocking, massively scalable architecture
• robust editor/build system, including powerful luau/rust/visual scripting integrations

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• helmer - the core runtime

• helmer_window - winit windowing integration runtime extension

• helmer_input - input handling/APIs runtime extension

• helmer_audio - audio core/engine runtime extension

• helmer_render - render graph runtime extension

• helmer_ui - ui runtime extension. robust retained APIs, rich egui-like immediate APIs

• helmer_editor_runtime - a robust runtime over helmer_becs, serving as the foundation for the editors/player

• helmer_editor_egui - a featured, robust yet ergonomic editor over helmer_becs' egui integration, providing rich luau/rust/visual scripting integrations

• helmer_player - runtime to be shipped alongside the resulting asset packs of editor projects

Ways to use helmer

Attention Windows users: ensure the C++ ATL for x64/x86 (Latest MSVC) individual component is installed from Visual Studio Installer when depending on helmer_render (or disable wgpu's static-dxc feature)

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• helmer_editor_egui

  
  • cargo run -p helmer_editor_egui --release
  • see building to build a project

integration	desc	ease
helmer_ecs	the og! simple and surprisingly scalable (O(N) entity overhead!! 😭). basic scheduler	****
helmer_becs	a robust integration for the expeditious yet powerful bevy_ecs library	***
helmer_editor_egui	a featured, robust editor, exposing rich luau/rust/visual scripting integrations	*****
custom integration	manually implement a app/game logic paradigm over helmer	*

helmer_becs examples

• becs_bench: same-ish scene as test_game, with entity spawner system used to stress test earlier on
• helmer_view: a simple GLTF scene viewer tool, using helmer_ui's immediate APIs

helmer_ecs examples

• test_game: was the sandbox for spearheading features early on. bevy's ecs is better in every possible way and for that reason i have been using helmer_becs for everything since implementing it (i do wonder if there is any point in putting actual effort into a proper helmer ecs?)

Troubleshooting

• assets popping in/out, flickering: the default vram budgets are incredibly low - combined with the aggressive nature of the default streaming tuning this results in the churning of render/vram resources. hit ctrl+g to bring up the render graph window and increase the gpu budgets, then hit evict gpu only. helmer currently lacks the ability to agnostically probe avail/total vram

Left to do

• taskable work pool [helmer]

• promote statelessness of GraphRenderer

• WASM audio (and likely more im forgetting)

• proper editor

  • helmer_editor_egui's immediate nature is not scaling with the scope of the project
  • helmer_editor served as a loose port of helmer_editor_egui as to ensure & spearhead features of helmer_ui's retained APIs, meaning it inherited naughty/monolithic & immediate-motivated architectural decisions of helmer_editor_egui

• [50%] enforce proper, clean code structure (break up monoliths like AssetServer, audio, GraphRenderer, helmer_editor_egui/scripting, etc..)

Why you did that

• basis-universal-sys was vendorized for WASM compatibility
• egui-snarl was vendorized because it handled rclick content menu input in a way that didnt allow elements like a search bar to be interacted with without the menu closing (closed on any click instead of clicks of proper intent)
• egui-wgpu vendorized for wgpu28 compatibility