Rabbet is a 3D engine I'm building from scratch in C++. It's a sparse-set ECS with a modern OpenGL renderer and an editor called forge on top.

• ECS core. Sparse-set entities with versioned handles over dense component pools, run by a small system-and-resource runtime. Systems are tagged Always or Play, so gameplay code only ticks between Play and Stop.
• Renderer. An OpenGL 4.1 forward path with metallic-roughness PBR and a Phong fallback. There are directional, point and spot lights, shadow maps, emissive surfaces and optional image-based lighting, plus a post stack (bloom, tone mapping, FXAA), CPU particles, and heightmap or noise terrain.
• Editor (forge). A dockable ImGui workspace around a render-to-texture viewport, with click-to-pick, gizmo handles with snapping, and Play/Pause/Step/Stop that snapshots the scene and restores it on Stop. The asset browser draws live thumbnails, and the hierarchy is a real tree you reparent by dragging.
• Content is data. Every asset carries a stable UUID and an .import sidecar. Models (glTF, OBJ, FBX), textures, audio, materials, shaders and prefabs are all first-class, and scenes save to readable JSON. Prefabs can capture and rebuild whole entity subtrees, not just single objects.
• Scripting. Lua behaviour through sol2, with live hot-reload and inspector-editable fields. Scripts get an entity and world API to find other entities, spawn and destroy prefabs, and move physics bodies.
• Physics and audio. Jolt rigidbodies with box, sphere and terrain-mesh colliders, advanced at a fixed timestep. Audio is miniaudio, with spatial emitters placed from the active camera.
• Tested. 45 headless CTest suites, and the engine and editor build clean under -Werror in Debug and Release.

A small demo game, Orb Hunt, lives under examples/forge/assets/orbhunt and runs from the editor. Load the scene, hit Play, and roll the ball around collecting orbs.

git clone https://github.com/Adel-Ayoub/Rabbet.git
cd Rabbet

cmake -S . -B build          # configures and fetches dependencies
cmake --build build -j       # builds the engine, editor, examples and tests
./build/bin/forge            # launch the editor

Requires CMake 3.24+ and a C++20 compiler. Dependencies are fetched and built from pinned sources on first configure; a few single-header libraries are vendored in-tree under third_party/.

Options: -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release, -DRABBET_BUILD_EDITOR=OFF, -DRABBET_BUILD_TESTS=OFF.

Built on excellent open-source libraries: GLFW, GLM, Dear ImGui + ImGuizmo, assimp, nlohmann/json, Lua + sol2, Jolt Physics, miniaudio, stb and glad. Sample art comes from Poly Haven (CC0): the crate model, and the boulder and forest ground that dress the Lantern Waves clearing. The nfd file dialog is nativefiledialog-extended (Zlib). The editor bundles the Inter and JetBrains Mono typefaces (OFL) and icon glyphs from Lucide (ISC).

Apache License 2.0 — Copyright (c) 2026 Adel-Ayoub. See LICENSE.