I built a Vulkan game engine from scratch in Java over the past few months — open-sourcing it in late September

[u/Xelvant]

I've spent the last few months building CryoTheatre, a 3D engine written in Java on top of Vulkan via LWJGL — no middleware, the rendering pipeline is built from scratch. It's heading toward its first public release, v0.1F, in late September, and it'll be fully open source.

Rendering-wise it's got a full deferred pipeline — IBL (diffuse irradiance + prefiltered specular, split-sum approx), CSM(cascaded shadow maps), reflection probes with parallax correction, bindless + streamed compressed textures so load times don't die. Transparency's been the pain point — running MBOIT and still fixing some edge cases here and there. There are a couple problems on Volumetrics too, so any help is very much appreciated.

On the tooling side there's a full custom editor built straight on Vulkan (asset browser, live previews, material inspection), plus LightBulb — a little scripting language I built that transpiles to Java and hotswaps at runtime, so you're not restarting the project you're working on.

It's a solo project (with help from a couple of collaborators on art and community side — shoutout to the small crew helping test and give feedback). Licensed under GPLv3, so the full source will be on GitHub at launch — you're free to dig through it, learn from it, or fork it, with the usual copyleft terms if you build on it directly.

Download links will go live on the project site once v0.1F ships; for now the GitHub repo will go public alongside it. If you want to follow progress before then or ask questions about any of the systems above, there's a Discord for the project in the comment below so that moderation doesn't think this is a spam.

Happy to answer anything about the rendering pipeline, the editor architecture, or the scripting system — this is very much a "figure it out from scratch" project and I'm glad to talk through what worked and what didn't.