Hybrid Engine

A personal engine project for studying modern engine architecture, runtime/editor boundaries, and practical toolchain design through real implementation work.

Overview

Hybrid Engine is a long-term implementation playground for understanding how rendering, assets, scene data, editor tooling, input, events, and runtime systems should be structured and how they evolve together.

Current development is mainly focused on:

• editor-driven scene workflow
• asset import, metadata, and cooked-cache pipeline
• render architecture cleanup and pass evolution
• play-mode transitions, scene switching, and early physics iteration

Status Snapshot

Platform	Toolchain
Windows 10 / 11	Visual Studio 2022 + MSVC + CMake 3.20+

Rendering	Main Entry
OpenGL 4.5	bin\HybridEditor.exe

Current Focus	Dev Log
Editor, asset pipeline, render architecture, scene workflow	docs/CHANGELOG.md

Requirements

Current primary development environment:

• Windows 10 or Windows 11
• CMake 3.20 or later
• A compiler with C++17 support
• Visual Studio 2022 / MSVC is the recommended toolchain
• A GPU and driver environment capable of running OpenGL 4.5

Build and Run

Initialize submodules first:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Configure and build manually:

cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build --config Release

Or use the Windows helper script:

build_windows.bat

Run the editor:

bin\HybridEditor.exe

Runtime notes:

• The build copies the editor executable, shaders, and editor resources into bin/.
• If no project argument is passed, the engine falls back to a debug bootstrap project at bin/GameProject/GameProject.hyproj.
• Runtime logs are written to bin/hybrid_engine.log.

Project CLI

Open an existing project:

bin\HybridEditor.exe --project F:\Projects\MyGame\MyGame.hyproj

You can also pass a project directory. The editor will look for a .hyproj file in that directory:

bin\HybridEditor.exe --project F:\Projects\MyGame

Create and open a new project:

bin\HybridEditor.exe --new-project F:\Projects\MyGame

Optionally override the project name used for the generated .hyproj file:

bin\HybridEditor.exe --new-project F:\Projects\Sandbox --project-name SandboxGame

Notes:

• For the most explicit workflow, prefer passing the absolute path to the .hyproj file.
• --project and --new-project cannot be used together.
• If --project-name is omitted, the new project's directory name is used.

Documentation

Project site:

• Hybrid Engine Website

Project documentation lives under docs/:

• Changelog: development history and milestone notes
• Development Plan: current plan and longer-term structure
• Render System: current render-system architecture and pass layout
• Resource System: runtime/editor asset pipeline, registry, cache, and loading flow
• Render ECS Asset Chain: integration notes for mesh, material, ECS, and editor flow inside the render path
• Event System: event dispatch and input/event bridge notes
• Log System: logging structure and usage

Features & Current Status

Already implemented or broadly usable:

• Core runtime foundation: logging, events, input, window system, and main loop
• Rendering baseline: OpenGL backend, framebuffer path, forward rendering, and Scene / Game viewport split
• Scene system: EnTT-based entities and components, scene serialization, hierarchy data, and the scene_document flow
• Editor basics: docking UI, Hierarchy, Inspector, Scene View, Game View, Project Panel, gizmo interaction, and object picking
• Asset-system baseline: VFS logical paths, asset registry, .meta files, cooked cache output, and loading for textures, meshes, materials, and scenes
• Import workflow: OBJ import, material generation, texture import, drag-and-drop scene placement, and initial hot-reload support
• Lighting: directional lights and point lights in the current render path
• Physics baseline: AABB collision, collider registration, rigidbody iteration, and collider gizmo debugging

Still under active development:

• The render-pipeline split is still being refined and higher-level pass orchestration is not fully settled yet.
• Shadow, outline, and post-process paths have started but are not complete yet.
• The physics system is still in an early iteration phase and remains unstable overall.
• The editor workflow is already useful for experiments and feature validation, but polish, reliability, and tooling depth still need work.
• Audio and scripting systems have not been implemented yet.

Roadmap

Near-term focus:

• continue refining render-pipeline structure, including pass execution flow, shader management, and data upload paths
• improve physics behavior, rigidbody flow, and editor-side debugging support
• strengthen scene-editing reliability across edit/play transitions
• keep improving asset hot reload, cache invalidation, and import stability

Planned future work:

• more complete rendering features such as shadows, outline, and post-process
• a more polished editor workflow and better panel-level usability
• broader coverage for default resources and failure paths in the asset system
• audio-system exploration
• scripting support and runtime extensibility after the core architecture becomes more stable

For the broader plan, see docs/plans/PROJECT_PLAN_ENG.md.

Closing Notes

Hybrid Engine is still a long-term personal learning and research project. If you are also interested in engine architecture, editor tooling, or asset workflows, feel free to reach out.

Special thanks to @SaluteBEE and @zong4 for support, collaboration, and discussion. Contact:

• Portfolio: Portfolio
• Email: pigchick1623@gmail.com