Hyperion

An open-source 3D game engine written in C++20 a decade in the making

Get the Code Docs

Licensed MIT.

About Hyperion

Hyperion started as a passion project in 2016, and is still worked on daily.

Our aim with Hyperion is to offer a high fidelity gaming experience even on low-end hardware using our in-house baking system to prepare as much of the lighting and effects as possible ahead of time.

That, and the editor shouldn't suck.

Screenies

Hyperion editor viewport showing the Sponza atrium with sunlight coming through the roof
Sponza atrium rendered in the Hyperion editor viewport with baked sunlight.
Hyperion editor viewport showing a dark brick test scene with baked lighting
Baked global illumination in a dark brick test scene.

Features

  • Global illumination

    Offline lightmap baker : bake lightmaps ahead of time, so games can look good on a potato

    Screen-space : SSR, and HBAO are supported with and without baked lighting

    Ray-traced : DDGI probes and reflections on RTX / RDNA hardware

  • GPU-driven rendering

    Vulkan and DirectX 12 with clustered shading. Occlusion culling runs in compute and feeds indirect draws directly, including for GPU-simulated particles.

  • Strata for scripts

    Strata is a statically typed, compiled, LLVM-backed gameplay scripting language that recompiles live on save.

    Read more about the Strata scripting language

  • World streaming

    Grid layers load cells in and out on a background thread as the player moves, so there are no loading screens between zones.

  • Multiplayer

    Multiplayer is built in. The engine includes a dedicated server and clients connect to it.

  • Physics

    Hyperion uses Jolt Physics for rigid bodies, and character controllers. Works over net.

Windows · macOS · Android · iOS

Platforms

Target Status
WindowsSupported
macOSSupported
AndroidSupported (NDK 29, arm64-v8a, API 28+)
iOSSupported
Steam DeckVia Proton
LinuxPlanned, not in active development

Editor runs on Windows and macOS only.

Get started

Building Hyperion Engine

Build steps live in the repository: Documentation/CompilingTheEngine.md.

MIT-licensed open source

Hyperion Engine is MIT licensed. Copyright The Hyperion Contributors. Free for commercial and indie.

Get involved

We welcome contributors of all skill levels. If you find a bug, have an idea, or want to help contribute to the project, we'd love your support!

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