Timefall is a work-in-progress 2D/3D game engine with an editor and C# scripting, originally inspired by The Cherno's Game Engine Series and now developed well beyond it. The goal is a Windows-first engine with AAA-grade rendering quality and performance, an editor workflow comparable to commercial tools, and a scripted gameplay layer in C#.
Timefall has grown from a bare-bones 2D renderer into a full forward 3D PBR pipeline with shadows, IBL, an entity-component scene system, C# scripting, 2D physics, an asset pipeline, and an in-editor profiler.
- Forward 3D PBR renderer (
Renderer3D) with metallic-roughness Cook-Torrance direct lighting (GGX/Smith/Schlick), energy compensation, geometric specular anti-aliasing, normal mapping, and an emissive term. - Image-based lighting: HDR equirectangular environment maps baked to cubemaps, GGX-prefiltered specular + diffuse irradiance convolution, and a skybox pass, driven by a
SkyLightComponent. - Shadows for all three light types: cascaded shadow maps for the directional sun (up to 4 cascades, configurable resolution/split/blend), spot light shadows, and point light (cubemap) shadows — each with both hard and PCSS soft-shadow modes, plus a demand-sized shadow atlas.
- HDR pipeline: RGBA16F framebuffer with a tonemap/exposure resolve pass (Reinhard, ReinhardExtended, Hable, ACES Narkowicz/Hill, AgX, Khronos PBR Neutral).
- Transparency: alpha-mode blending with a sorted transparent pass, and physically-based inverse-square light falloff.
- 2D batch renderer (
Renderer2D) for quads, circles, lines, and MSDF text rendering, alongside the 3D path.
An entt-based ECS with a scene graph (parent/child transform hierarchy). Native components include transforms, sprite/circle renderers, MSDF text, meshes with materials, lights (directional/point/spot), sky lights, cameras, 2D physics bodies and colliders, and script components — plus user-defined components authored in C#.
C# gameplay scripting (Timefall-ScriptCore, .NET 9) hosted in-process via hostfxr, with assembly hot-reload. The scripting API covers entity transforms and hierarchy, component add/remove/query, entity creation/destruction, input, scene loading, and 2D physics (impulses, velocity, body type), plus a small in-game UI toolkit.
2D physics via Box2D — rigidbodies (static/dynamic/kinematic) and box/circle colliders, exposed to both the editor and C# scripts. 3D physics is not yet implemented.
An asset manager (editor and runtime variants) with per-type importers for textures, materials (.tfmat), meshes (Assimp-backed, including FBX), and scenes. Projects are .tfproj files; scenes serialize to YAML.
A full editor built on Dear ImGui: scene hierarchy and inspector, content browser, viewport with gizmos and entity picking, Edit/Play/Simulate scene states with a toolbar, shadow and post-process settings panels, and a real-time profiler panel showing frame/draw-call/triangle stats.
Tracy-based CPU and GPU profiling (TF_PROFILE_* macros wrapping a first-party Tracy fork), with RAM and per-category VRAM tracking, integrated into the editor's profiler panel alongside Renderer3D frame statistics.
Visual Studio is recommended; Timefall targets Windows only while the engine matures.
1. Clone the repository:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/AhmedYAbbas/Timefall
If already cloned non-recursively, run git submodule update --init to pull in the submodules.
2. Generate project files:
Run scripts/Win-GenProjects.bat to generate the Visual Studio solution (Timefall.slnx) via premake. Re-run it any time premake scripts change or files are added/removed.
3. Build:
Open Timefall.slnx and build the Timefall-Editor startup project (Debug/Release/Dist configurations).