Elemental Engine

A real-time, compute-driven Multi-Physics & Reactivity Engine built from scratch in C++20 and Vulkan 1.3, featuring coupled multi-element interactions (gas, viscoelastic fluids, electricity, thermodynamics) and a custom Render Hardware Interface (RHI).

version 1.2.0

Showcase

GIFs and pictures of the older versions can be found here.

Technical Highlights

1. Coupled Multi-Physics Simulation (GPU Compute)

• Viscous Fluid Dynamics (PBF): Position-Based Fluids implementation based on Clavet et al. Particle-based Viscoelastic Fluid Simulation.
• Eulerian Gas Simulation (Stam Stable Fluids): 3D Navier-Stokes.
• Procedural Dielectric Breakdown: 3D Midpoint Displacement lightning arcs with branching.
• Systemic Thermodynamic Coupling: Slime acts as a dynamic continuous gas emitter; electrical arcs trigger localized thermal thresholds, initiating heat transfar and fire.

2. Rendering Pipelines & Volume Integration

• Screen-Space Fluid Rendering (SSFR)
• Volumetric Raymarcher
• Vertex Pulling

3. Modern Vulkan 1.3 Core & RHI

• Low-Overhead Custom RHI: Backend-agnostic hardware abstraction layer architected for explicit APIs (Native Vulkan 1.3; extensible to DX12).
• Dynamic Rendering: No legacy render pass/framebuffer boilerplate.
• Memory Management: Integrated Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA).
• Diagnostic Instrumentation: Debug labeling via VK_EXT_debug_utils for deep Nsight Graphics and RenderDoc frame analysis.

Performance & Metrics

Benchmarked on: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super / Intel Core CPU i7

Pipeline Phase	Type	Time ($\text{ms}$)
PBF Slime Simulation	Compute	2.14 ms
Stam Fluid Simulation	Compute	1.32 ms
Stam Fluid Raymarcher	Graphics	0.11 ms
SSFR	Graphics / Compute	0.04 ms
Fire Particle Renders	Graphics	0.04 ms
Fire Particle Simulation	Compute	0.02 ms
Terrain Geometry Pass	Graphics	<0.01 ms
Active Frame Time	Mixed	~3.72 ms
Total Frame Time	Mixed	~3.73 ms

On a Mac M2 using MoltenVK: The frame rate with 10000 Clavet Slime particle stays well over 80 FPS.

The optimizations steps are given in Docs.

Dependencies

• API: Vulkan SDK 1.3+
• Memory Subsystem: Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA)
• C++20 support required

Building from Source

git clone https://github.com/ArminGEtemad/ElementalEngine.git
cd ElementalEngine
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --config Release

LICENSE

This project is under MIT License