Nocture Engine

A work-in-progress 3D game engine built from scratch in modern C++.

Nocturne Engine is a learning project exploring low-level game engine design, featuring a custom Entity Component System and OpenGL rendering pipeline. Built to understand how modern game engines work under the hood.

Current State

Screen.Recording.2026-03-08.213308.mp4

Current Features

Core Systems:

Custom Entity Component System (ECS) architecture

• Entities and Entity Manager/Factory
• Components and Component Manager/Factory
• Rendering System: 3D rendering, materials, phong lighting model
• Resource Manager
• Global Event Bus

GLFW window management

Architecture Highlights

The engine follows data-oriented design principles

• Contiguous component storage for cache efficiency (using eg. Sparse Sets)
• Separation of data (components) and behavior (systems)
• Rendering data structures prepared for future Vulkan and DirectX implementations

Building

Make sure to download included submodules with:

git submodule init
git submodule update

Then build with cmake for your preferred C++20 compatible compiler :)

cmake -B build
cmake --build build

Requirements:

• C++20 compatible compiler
• CMake 3.15+
• OpenGL 3.3+ compatible GPU

Builds both on Arch (GCC and Clang) and Windows 11 on MSVC (VS2022).