FoxEngine

A from-scratch DirectX 11 rendering engine built on Windows with C++17. Features a physically-based forward renderer, real-time shadows, GPU particle system, post-processing pipeline, custom physics, and ImGui debug tooling.

Features

Rendering

• PBR Forward Pipeline — Cook-Torrance BRDF (GGX + Smith-Schlick + Fresnel)
• Image-Based Lighting — Equirectangular HDR panorama sampling for diffuse irradiance + specular reflections
• Shadows — Cascaded shadow maps (4-cascade), point light cube shadows, spot light shadow maps
• Post-Processing — HDR rendering, ACES/Reinhard tone mapping, volumetric fog / god rays, FXAA
• Screen-Space Effects — SSR, SSAO (hemisphere sampling + bilateral blur)
• Bloom — Dual Kawase blur chain with threshold
• Emissive Materials — Per-texture emissive with intensity/color
• Alpha Support — Alpha test for foliage, alpha blending for transparent materials
• Render Queue — Front-to-back opaque, back-to-front transparent, frustum culling

GPU Particle System

• Fully GPU-driven — Compute shaders for emit/update, indirect draw (no CPU readback)
• Flipbook atlas — Animated sprite sheets (configurable grid + frame count)
• Shader modes — Textured billboard (flipbook) or procedural ember glow
• Per-emitter blend — Additive (fire/embers) or alpha blend (smoke)
• Soft particles — Depth-fade near geometry intersections
• HDR particles — Colors above 1.0 trigger bloom glow
• Emission mode — Continuous or single/manual burst trigger
• Billboard orientation — Fixed angle with optional random rotation
• Texture rotation — Per-emitter UV rotation to correct source texture orientation
• Tracer support — Velocity-aligned billboard stretch for bullet tracers
• Preset defaults — Load emitter default presets from JSON in Assets/Particles/Presets/

Engine Systems

• Scene Management — JSON scene descriptors with hot-reload, objects + particles + lights
• Physics — AABB/Sphere/OBB narrowphase, rigidbody dynamics, collision response, raycasting, character controller
• Input — Win32 raw input, XInput gamepad
• Asset Pipeline — DDS/WIC texture loading, Assimp mesh import
• Lighting — Directional + point + spot lights, all with shadow support

Requirements

• Windows 10+ (x64)
• Visual Studio 2022 (MSVC v143 toolchain)
• CMake 3.20+
• vcpkg (refer microsoft docs on how to setup)

Building

cmake -B build -S . -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=path/to/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake
cmake --build build --config Debug

The build produces build/Game/Debug/TestGame.exe. The exe auto-detects the project root — just double-click it or run from any directory. Shaders and assets are loaded directly from source (Engine/Shaders/, Assets/).

Shader/asset iteration: Edit any .hlsl or asset file and re-run the exe — no rebuild needed. Only C++ changes require a build.

Dependencies (via vcpkg)

Library	Purpose
assimp	Mesh import (FBX, glTF, OBJ)
imgui	Debug UI (DX11 + Win32 backend)
directxtex	DDS/HDR texture loading, BC compression
nlohmann-json	Scene descriptor serialization

Project Structure

FoxEngine/
├── Engine/              # Static library (FoxEngine.lib)
│   ├── Shaders/         # HLSL shaders (loaded directly at runtime)
│   ├── include/Engine/  # Public headers (SE:: namespace)
│   │   ├── Core/        # Platform, logging, clock
│   │   ├── Renderer/    # Graphics pipeline, mesh, materials, post-processing
│   │   ├── Physics/     # Collision, dynamics, raycasting
│   │   ├── Input/       # Keyboard, mouse, gamepad
│   │   ├── Scene/       # Entity, components, camera, scene loading
│   │   └── Assets/      # Asset manager, resource cache
│   └── src/             # Implementation (mirrors include/)
├── Game/                # Test executable (integration target)
├── Assets/              # Runtime assets (textures, models, scenes)
│   ├── Scenes/          # JSON scene descriptors
│   └── Particles/       # Particle textures (flipbooks, smoke, etc.)
└── Tools/               # Build-time utilities (texture converter)

Scene Format

Scenes are defined as JSON files in Assets/Scenes/. Example:

{
  "name": "My Scene",
  "skybox": "Assets/Textures/sky.dds",
  "camera": { "eye": [0, 5, -10], "yaw": 0, "pitch": 0 },
  "sun": { "elevation": 60, "azimuth": -135, "intensity": 1.0 },
  "bloom": { "enabled": true, "threshold": 1.0, "intensity": 0.1 },
  "fog": {
    "enabled": true,
    "density": 0.03,
    "anisotropy": 0.8,
    "scatterIntensity": 1.2,
    "steps": 48,
    "maxDistance": 60.0,
    "ambientColor": [1.0, 1.0, 1.0],
    "ambientIntensity": 0.1,
    "heightFalloff": 0.0,
    "heightBase": 0.0,
    "noiseStrength": 0.35,
    "noiseScale": 0.035,
    "noiseSpeed": 0.0
  },
  "pointLights": [
    { "position": [5, 3, 0], "color": [1, 0.8, 0.5], "radius": 50, "castShadow": true }
  ],
  "particles": [
    {
      "position": [0, 0.5, 0],
      "emit_rate": 15,
      "max_particles": 60,
      "texture": "Assets/Particles/flipbook_fire.dds",
      "atlasColumns": 5,
      "atlasRows": 5
    }
  ]
}

License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.