Warning

🚧 Heavily work in progress. Odyssey Engine is in early, active development.

Odyssey Engine

A custom 3D game engine in C++23 with a separate C#/WPF editor. The editor communicates with the engine over a local socket, allowing the engine to be restarted independently if it crashes without taking down the editor.

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Overview

Engine (C++23)

A standalone runtime that owns the window, the renderer, and the world.

• Rendering - OpenGL 4.6 core profile via GLAD, windowing through GLFW, math via GLM. A simple forward renderer draws meshes with a per-object model matrix and flat color.
• ECS - a sparse-set entity-component registry. Entities are an index + version pair; components live in packed pools for cache-friendly iteration. The registry exposes Create, Destroy, Add, Remove, Has, Get, and a templated View<...> for system queries.
• Components & systems - Transform, MeshRenderer, and Spin components, driven by a RenderSystem and a SpinSystem. Systems iterate the world each frame through the registry's view API.
• Messaging - a thread-safe EventBus supporting immediate publish, deferred enqueue/flush, prioritized handlers, and scoped subscriptions.
• Editor bridge - a TCP server that speaks a small RPC + event protocol. Requests carry an id, method, and params; the engine answers with typed JSON. Outbound and inbound event types are registered through a JsonProxy so payloads serialize automatically.

Editor (C#, .NET 10)

A native WPF desktop application built on a clean, layered architecture.

• Domain / Application / UI - strict separation of concerns. The Application layer holds framework-agnostic services and interfaces; the UI layer is WPF + MVVM.
• MVVM - view models built on CommunityToolkit.Mvvm, wired together with Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting dependency injection.
• Panels - a Hierarchy, an Inspector, a Console, a Controls bar, and a Workspace that hosts the embedded engine.
• Services - a logging service with leveled output piped to the in-editor console, and an undo/redo service backed by a command stack.
• Engine connection - an async TCP client with length-prefixed JSON framing, request/response correlation via TaskCompletionSource, background read loop, and connection retry.

How the embedding works

When the workspace opens, the editor:

1. Launches the engine process headless (-hide) on a chosen port.
2. Connects to the engine's socket and retries until the runtime is listening.
3. Sends a get_viewport request and receives the engine window's native handle (HWND).
4. Reparents that window into a WPF HwndHost, restyles it as a child window, and keeps it sized to the panel.

The result is a single editor window with the real, live C++ OpenGL viewport rendering inside it.

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Tech stack

Area	Choice
Engine language	C++23
Graphics	OpenGL 4.6 core, GLAD, GLFW, GLM
Serialization	nlohmann/json
Engine build	CMake + Ninja, MSVC 2022
Editor language	C# / .NET 10
Editor UI	WPF, MVVM (CommunityToolkit.Mvvm)
DI / hosting	Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting
Engine ↔ editor	TCP, length-prefixed JSON (RPC + events)
Task runner	just

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Prerequisites

Windows-only - the editor uses WPF and native HWND reparenting, and the engine builds with MSVC.

• Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools (MSVC toolchain)
• Ninja - winget install Ninja-build.Ninja
• just - winget install Casey.Just
• .NET 10 SDK (for the editor)

CMake fetches GLFW, GLAD, GLM, and nlohmann/json automatically on first configure.

Setup

1. Point the editor at the built engine binary in Editor/OdysseyEditor.UI/appsettings.json (EnginePath, Port).
2. Set the path to your VsDevCmd.bat in justconfig.json.

Build & run

Build the engine:

just build-engine

Clean engine build artifacts:

just clean-engine

Then run the editor from your .NET tooling. It will launch the engine, connect, and embed the viewport.

The engine can also run standalone via the launcher, which accepts:

Flag	Effect
-game / -editor	launch mode
-hide	run without showing its own window (used when embedded)
-port <n>	editor bridge port
-width / -height <n>	window size
-vsync <0|1>	toggle vsync