Elemental Engine

This project is my most ambitious project until now.

The core idea is to have an engine to render different elements and their interaction

Target: This engine must be finished around the time I finish my PhD.

A real-time Multi-Element Reactivity Engine built from scratch in modern C++ to simulate

• gas behavior
• Liquid behavior
• Electricity
• Thermodynamics (fire and explosion)

and their interaction.

I will be writing the engine without any use of game engines. My focus is right now on Vulkan backend. However I am trying to write an abstraction layer to make it possible to add DX12 and even Metal at some point. But that is for the future...

Core Architecture & Pipeline Layout

I will be using two backends

• Vulkan 1.3 Backend (Main Focus)
• DirectX 12 Backend (Paused)

Used Hardware

Development Device: Intel Core CPU / NVIDIA RTX 4070 Ti Super / Windows 11

Simulation Framework

• Stam's Stable fluid (Poison Gas)
• Clevet Particle-based Viscoelastic Fluid Simulation (Acidic Slime)
• Macklin Position Based Fluids (An experimental case was developed at first for acidic bath but It wasn't the way I liked it. I save it for the Future updates but for water.)
• Electricity using midpoint displacement
• For the electricity I started first by trying space colonization algorithm. Which was too slow. I then moved to midpoint displacement.
• Thermodynamics

Dependencies

I used VMA (Vulkan Memory Allocator) for memory allocations. You can find it here and install it.

Moving Forward

The following is how I would like to move forward with the project

• Set up windowing (GLFW/SDL), swapchains, and device initialization for both Vulkan 1.3 and DX12.
• Build the thin HAL. Get a basic triangle rendering in both APIs to verify the pipeline.
• Implement Compute Shader dispatching in the HAL. Set up structured buffers and read/write textures.
• Write a basic advection and diffusion compute shader to move generic "density" around.
• Fluid Dynamics (Poison Gas)
• DX12 development is paused here.
• Collision Geometry (Dirichlet boundary condition)
• Added Acidic Slime using Clavet algorithm
• phase change compute pass
• Add lightning strike (electricity)
• Add interactivity between lightning strike and slime
• Ingnition logic when lightning strikes the slime
• Rendering fire when the slime burns
• Post-processing, move to 3D?
• Optimization