Shalltear Engine ❤️

A free/libre, lightweight C++ game engine.

Feel free to take a build, poke it, and contribute. 🧙~

Get the latest build

Features

Editor

Dockable panels, detachable (into their own windows), saved layouts
Hierarchy, Inspector, Asset Browser, Console, Profiler
Scene view: perspective, orthographic, 2D
Move/rotate/scale handles. Snapping. Local/world frames
Shaded, wireframe, shaded wireframe, normals, and depth views
Game view with play, pause, step, and mute
Undo and redo
Asset thumbnails and Inspector previews
Project hub with a recent-projects list
Settings scoped to the project/to you/to you in this project
Package manager
UI builder and UI debugger
Animator graph, dope sheet, and curve editors
Audio mixer window with live meters
Panels, inspectors, property drawers, and gizmos addable from your module

Scenes and objects

Scenes, objects, components, behaviors
Transform on the object itself
Opt-in per-frame tick. Fixed timestep. Delta time, time scale, pause
Additive scene loading. Budgeted async loads
Prefabs, nested prefabs, prefab variants with live propagation
Prefab editing stage
Editor-only folders and per-object label colors in the hierarchy
Data assets you define yourself

C++ scripting

Gameplay written in C++
Hot reload while the game runs, with state preserved
Compile from the editor. Compile on save
Compiler diagnostics as clickable console rows
find_package(Shalltear) CMake package. Generated project files
Toolchain discovery. Generated VS Code settings
Reflected fields shown/edited in the Inspector

Rendering

Vulkan 1.3
Forward+ with clustered lights
Directional, point, and spot lights
Cascaded directional shadows. Spot and point shadows
Metallic-roughness and unlit shading (with a custom lighting hook)
HLSL compiled to SPIR-V, hot reloaded, with keyword variants
Per-material blend, cull, alpha clip, and sorting priority
Sky from a cubemap or a procedural one. Image-based ambient and specular
Reflection probes from a cubemap (box-projected and blended)
MSAA, render scale, vsync
Tonemapping: Neutral, ACES, AgX, or none
Graphics profiles and quality levels (switchable while the game runs)
Render graph. Custom passes authored as assets

Physics (optional)

Rigidbodies: dynamic, kinematic, static
Box, sphere, capsule, and mesh colliders. Compound bodies
Physics materials, with friction and bounce combine modes
Named collision categories
Raycast, sphere cast, capsule cast, overlap sphere
Collision and trigger callbacks
Hinge, fixed, spring, character, and prismatic joints
Moving platforms that carry what stands on them
Multi-threaded, fixed-timestep simulation
Collider gizmos and a debug view

Animation (optional)

Skeletal animation and skinning
Blend shapes
Clips imported from models/authored in the editor
Animator controller: states, transitions, parameters, conditions
Blend trees
Layers and masks
Retargeting between rigs
Root motion
Animation events and method calls
Audio keys that play a sound from the animated object
Any reflected field is keyframeable
A per-frame budget spread across many animators

Post-processing (optional)

Volumes and profiles (blended by where the camera is)
Color grading: contrast, color filter, hue shift, saturation
Bloom
Vignette
Ambient occlusion

Audio (optional)

Audio sources, listeners, and one-shots. Playback scheduled to the sample
Opus, QOA, or PCM. Decompressed on load, compressed in memory, or streamed
3D sound: logarithmic, linear, or custom curves over distance. Spread. Doppler
Spatializer plugins
Mixers: groups, sends, snapshots with transitions, exposed parameters
Reverb, echo, chorus, flange, distortion, EQ, compressor, pitch shifter, and ducking
Filter components. Reverb zones with presets
Real and virtual voices, priority, concurrency limits
Random, layered, and interactive containers
Music switches on the beat or the bar
Effects/generators addable from your module, hot reloaded
Clip preview with a waveform. An audio profiler
Mixing on its own thread (never allocates/locks)

UI

Retained element tree with flexbox layout
Stylesheets with a CSS-like cascade
.slxml layout documents, .slss stylesheets, templates and instances
Buttons, text and number fields, sliders, dropdowns, trees, scroll views, split panes, menus
Drag and drop
Docking
Text in TrueType and OpenType fonts
SVG vector icons
DPI-aware sizing
Screen-space UI in a running game
Offscreen UI surfaces

Assets

glTF, GLB, and FBX models import as object hierarchies
Their meshes/materials/textures/rigs/clips usable separately from the file they came in
Extract any of those to a file of its own
PNG, JPEG, TGA, and HDR textures
WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, and Ogg Vorbis audio
TrueType and OpenType fonts, SVG vectors
Per-asset import settings. Re-import
An import cache keyed on what the importer read
GUID references and text sidecars
Binary/JSON serialization, driven by reflection
Asset browser with folders, filtering, and a create menu
Scene, material, shader, and primitive creation
Built-in primitive meshes

Shipping a game

Standalone Windows x64 player (no editor code in it)
Headless dedicated server target
Build profiles with inheritance. Build report. Command-line builds
Content cooked into an .slpak, LZ4 compressed

Core

Reflection over types, fields, methods, and containers
Handle-based objects
Tagged allocators and a leak report
Work-stealing job system
Named profiler zones
Virtual file system with mounts/file watching
Logging
Keyboard, mouse, and gamepad input. Action maps. Focus routing
Multiple windows, multiple monitors, per-monitor DPI
Physics/animation/post-processing/audio ship as optional packages
No account. No network connections

Examples

Klotzchenprufstand (9/28/2026) is a voxel sandbox project we build on Shalltear to test the engine and showcase its potential. Here it is running in the editor.

DrunkenWrestlers (8/2/2026) is a partial port of a Unity game to Shalltear, with the same models and animations, created to test skinned meshes and ragdolls. Here is its physics-driven character in the editor.

Pricing

$0. No seat fee/royalty/revenue share.
You own everything you create with it.
The terms attached to a build cannot change after you have it.