Spartan Engine is a research-focused game engine developed over 10+ years, designed for experimentation and pushing the boundaries of rendering and simulation. While it started as a personal learning project, it has evolved into an active community of 600+ members on Discord, including industry professionals sharing knowledge and exploring advanced workflows.
Discord • X • Wiki • Issues
Upon launching the engine, you'll be greeted with a selection of default worlds to load. Each world is physics-enabled, allowing you to walk around, pick objects using your mouse, and even drive a car.
The most advanced and demanding world featuring 256 million procedurally generated grass blades (inspired by Ghost of Tsushima), spanning 64.1 km² covered in thousands of trees and rocks.
| Sponza 4K | Subway |
|---|---|
 True-to-life scale recreation of the Sponza building from Dubrovnik |
 Emissive materials and GI test |
| Minecraft | Liminal Space |
|---|---|
 A classic Minecraft world |
 Shifts your frequency to a nearby reality |
| Showroom |
|---|
 Car showroom - ideal for YouTubers/press as it doesn't use experimental tech |
Renderer
- Cutting-edge Vulkan renderer with DirectX 12 backend (WIP)
- Fully bindless design (materials, lights, samplers)
- Universal HLSL shaders across both backends
- 128-byte push constant buffer for fast CPU-to-GPU transfer
- Tightly packed 10-byte instance format handling hundreds of millions of instances
- On-the-fly GPU mip generation (FidelityFX SPD) and texture compression (FidelityFX Compressonator)
- Unified deferred rendering with transparency (BSDF with same render path)
Lighting & Shadows
- Atmospheric scattering, real-time filtering, IBL with bent normals
- Screen-space shadows (from Days Gone) and ambient occlusion (XeGTAO + visibility bitfield)
- Ray-traced reflections
- Fast shadow mapping with penumbra via shadow map atlas
- Volumetric fog
Performance & Upscaling
- Variable rate shading and dynamic resolution scaling
- Upscaling: XeSS 2 & FSR 3
- Temporal anti-aliasing
- Breadcrumbs for GPU crash tracing (FidelityFX Breadcrumbs)
Camera & Post-Processing
- Physically based camera with auto-exposure
- Physical light units (lumens & kelvin)
- Frustum & occlusion (Hi-Z) culling
- Tonemappers: ACES, AgX, Gran Turismo 7 (default)
- HDR10 output
- FXAA, bloom, motion blur, depth of field, chromatic aberration
- Pacejka tire model with combined slip, load sensitivity, and low speed stability
- Tire thermodynamics with slip heating, rolling heat, airflow cooling, and grip windows
- Multi-ray suspension with spring damper dynamics and anti-roll bars
- Full drivetrain: engine torque curve, clutch, engine braking, automatic gearbox
- Limited slip differential with preload and asymmetric accel/decel locking
- Traction control, ABS, and handbrake-induced rear slip
- Aerodynamics: drag, rolling resistance, front/rear downforce
- Input: Keyboard, mouse, controllers, steering wheels
- Physics: Comprehensive PhysX integration
- Profiling: CPU & GPU profiling tools
- Data: XML support, thread pool, entity-component and event systems
- File Formats: 10+ fonts, 30+ images, 40+ models
One-click project generation - see the Building Guide for details.
Check out Game.cpp to understand how default worlds are loaded and set up - it's the best starting point for understanding the engine's structure.
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Contributors get access to exclusive perks designed to accelerate learning and skill development. See the Contributing Guide to get started.
I cover the costs for Dropbox hosting to ensure library and asset bandwidth is available. If you enjoy running a single script and having everything download, compile, and work seamlessly, please consider sponsoring. Direct sponsorship is more helpful than Discord boosts since it goes directly into maintaining and improving the project.
- This engine started as a personal learning project and a way to enhance my portfolio while I was a university student. I also used it for my thesis at my university with professor Fotis Kokkoras.
- Godot Engine - Integrates Spartan's TAA (see code)
- Stalker Anomaly - Rendering addon using Spartan's source (ModDB)
- Programming Book - Jesse Guerrero's beginner programming book features Spartan's code and community
Using code from Spartan or inspired by it? Reach out - I'd love to showcase your project!
MIT License - free to use with attribution.