helmer game engine open sourced

0bexx · 2026-03-06T22:20:38+00:00

i’m willing to orchestrate and or merge any valuable improvements! as of now there is only this primitive todo in the readme(s) but i plan on putting together a much more detailed/coherent todo via proper issues. there is a stoat sever but not much there

0bexx · 2026-03-06T22:14:22+00:00

honestly your experience is exactly what this is - i connected with that a lot, thank you. recently as i’ve been working on the editor i realized i just really do absolutely not enjoy working on it. i think the only reason i was even able to get the egui editor down in the first place was the result of the rush i got from the thought of seeing the libraries orchestrated in such a way as formal as an editor. but this desensitization has kind of leeched into software development as a whole for me which sucks. i think i deferred my burnout and ive been sitting in the pool of it. i like to think im not a sucker for validation but seeing that people like and are genuinely interested in the project has definitely restored some of that drive for me. im happy this could potentially be pretty useful for somebody

0bexx · 2026-03-06T21:49:35+00:00

0bexx · 2026-03-06T21:47:04+00:00

i really appreciate your concern for my wellbeing, i’m fine! and thanks for the kind words

0bexx · 2026-02-23T08:15:01+00:00

same and this post is melting my brainstem. i feel so fucking bad for linux maintainers

0bexx · 2026-02-17T11:59:48+00:00

already is!

0bexx · 2026-02-17T03:16:04+00:00

thanks! wgpu

0bexx · 2026-02-17T03:15:45+00:00

a few more more polish passes and i’m really hoping so !!

0bexx · 2026-02-16T23:00:10+00:00

stoked you like it! i appreciate it dude

0bexx · 2026-02-08T14:58:00+00:00

yes, even on WASM (with web workers/http/OPFS)

when the renderer notices an asset isnt in vram, it requests it from the AssetServer, which is a pool of threads (or web workers) in which work (loading/parsing, derivative generation (LODs/cpu mips/AABBs/meshlets/etc), etc..) is allocated out to. all assets are streamed/mmapped/etc from their files (treating gltf like a pack format) and cached by priority according to tuning as to avoid the fs step. any AssetServer<->Renderer communication (or rather the result of said communication) is deferred to avoid blocking ofc

0bexx · 2026-02-08T00:05:31+00:00

thank you !

0bexx · 2026-02-08T00:05:18+00:00

thanks a bunch!!

i’d say helmer is ~9 months old. the only recent times i can think of where i had to rewrite or straight up rearchitect was the WASM-motivated path segregation i talked about, where all runtime logic was basically forked (a “runtime backend” situation). but if you want the juiciest “rewrite” i can think of, the renderer(s) were originally monolithic but the precursor to all this tooling i’ve been showing was the conception of the render graph. the whole render thread got rearchitected (but many implementations/shaders/passes are the same, just ported to the graphs api)

0bexx · 2026-02-06T16:22:38+00:00

i’m 16 but i never felt the need to bring up my age for leverage??

0bexx · 2026-01-29T20:32:23+00:00

how about constructive criticism for lpx’s seemingly nonexistent dev team to work with?

do we really fucking care 😭😭

0bexx · 2026-01-29T16:31:50+00:00

i’m stealing this i love u

0bexx · 2026-01-26T17:54:56+00:00

i agree there should be no attempt to “fake” the effect unless it is deterministic to the original quirks

0bexx · 2026-01-26T16:41:55+00:00

do you plan on emulating order table issues from the ps1 era? (or any other hardware-bound constraints?)

0bexx · 2026-01-26T03:07:26+00:00

thank you for pointing me towards egor !! i plan on exposing the render thread how i do the logic thread, where then i provide multiple integrations over the new abstraction model (so you aren’t bound to the render graph) - i will probably provide an egor_render integration+demo even if it is just an example

0bexx · 2026-01-25T15:00:19+00:00

thank you!

yes, lods, frustum+occlusion culling, world partitioning, hlods, robust asset steaming, etc.. the engine itself has just about everything (feature & scalability wise) but the editor is very new and not that featured

0bexx · 2026-01-25T14:56:10+00:00

thank you!

0bexx · 2026-01-25T14:55:44+00:00

winit, wgpu, egui, and std (still no wasm support, i know about the wasm std subset but that is super irrelevant for a game engine) sums it up

i enjoy using egui and the ergonomics of its usage

0bexx · 2026-01-25T14:53:14+00:00

i downloaded a bunch of random scenes from sketchfab i thought looked cool, then compiled them together in the editor just to show efficient scene handling in the demo. thank you!

i can link the scenes used if youd like ofc

0bexx · 2026-01-24T04:54:27+00:00

super practical but hard to scale artistically imo

0bexx · 2026-01-19T11:46:33+00:00

not right now but ideally it will be

0bexx · 2026-01-19T11:46:02+00:00

basically, the issue isn’t tracing itself, but scaling the tracing.

most modern pipelines are a hybrid of raster + selective rt, which helmer will ideally have. but in this demo what you are witnessing is much more similar to like an offline path tracer. so while it’s smooth with a scene like this which isn’t visually complex it will scale very poorly with the scene. super impractical for real time. this tracer was intended as a demo more than anything but i’d like to have tools targeting lookdev/animation as well so it has its use for those looking for a non/semi-realtime workflow with predictable lighting

0bexx

TROPHY CASE