motor

motor is a custom C++ real-time framework for graphics, tooling, runtime systems, and interactive applications.

The project is developed as a personal engine/runtime environment. It is not meant to compete with large commercial engines. Its purpose is to explore and build the systems behind real-time applications directly: rendering abstraction, resource lifetimes, scene composition, shader workflows, data flow, tooling, and live iteration.

Focus

motor is currently focused on demo and visual application workflows:

• multi-window rendering for tool and production views
• OpenGL and DirectX rendering backends
• explicit graphics resource configuration and release
• asynchronous render-resource workflows
• shader compilation and live iteration through MSL
• scene graph with components and visitors
• typed data-flow through the wire slot system
• glTF based scene import from Blender
• camera sequencing and animation playback
• HDR/post-processing and render-pass experiments

The engine is built around explicit control. Objects are configured before they are used, ownership is visible, and higher-level systems such as the scene graph can automate that lifecycle when needed.

Project Structure

The repository is split into small libraries. Important modules include:

• application - application and window integration
• graphics - backend-facing graphics objects, frontend command layer, render state and resource handling
• gfx - higher-level rendering helpers and camera utilities
• scene - scene graph, components, visitors, animation and graphics integration
• msl - motor shading language and shader translation infrastructure
• wire - typed slots and data-flow connections
• math, geometry, noise - math and geometry support
• concurrent - task and scheduling utilities
• tool, property - runtime tooling and editable data interfaces
• format - asset and file format integration

Third-party dependencies live under externals/ and are pulled in as git submodules. The engine integrates them through local CMake targets instead of modifying the external source code.

Related Repositories

The engine repository intentionally does not contain all demos and visual test applications.

• motor_suites contains sample applications, integration checks, and manual/visual test scenarios.
• motor_demos is used for demo-focused applications built on top of the engine.

This keeps the engine repository focused while still allowing larger examples and experiments to evolve separately.

Build

Clone with submodules:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/aconstlink/motor.git
cd motor
cmake -S . -B build
cmake --build build

If the repository was cloned without submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

Windows is the primary development platform. The engine is also built and tested on Linux for OpenGL-oriented configurations.

Status

Active development.

The current work is centered on building polished real-time demos and using them as production-style tests for the engine: Blender scene import, camera sequencing, scene streaming, render passes, shadows, HDR, bloom, and post-processing.

APIs and internal systems are still evolving. The repository is best understood as an engine development project and research runtime, not as a finished SDK.

License

MIT License.