ya. it's coming along amazing, the endorphin kick from seeing it come to life keeps you going. i'm working on a demo to really showcase that it does what I say it does :)

Mostly just the sheer amount of things there are to cover then testing it all. I've written over 2000 tests.. Then I always go back and forth on design decisions, and just want to make myself the perfect engine to build games from.

v0.4.0 by the numbers:

• 430+ API commands (up from 204)
• 72% AAA coverage (up from 59%)
• 1,100+ tests (all passing)
• Phase 5 visual polish: complete

Solo devs building AAA games. That's the mission.

Let's keep forging.

Global Illumination

Hybrid DDGI + SSGI: probe-based diffuse lighting with screen-space detail fill. Hardware ray tracing when available, software fallback when not.

54 new API commands. Offline baking. Debug visualization. Quality presets from 1.5ms to 10ms.

Lighting that just works

World building tools:

• Heightmap terrain with LOD geomorphing
• Gerstner wave water surfaces
• Buoyancy physics (wood, cork, metal presets)
• GPU ribbon trails for swords + magic
• 4-layer PBR material blending

Environments that feel real.

AI gets a brain:

• Behavior trees with JSON definitions
• Hierarchical state machines
• Perception system: vision cones, hearing, memory
• Per-entity blackboards

NPCs that see, hear, and remember.

Audio levels up:

• Hierarchical bus routing
• Raycast-based occlusion (muffled through walls)
• Reverb zones with room presets

Sound that knows where it is.

Animation gets serious:

• Root motion extraction
• Additive layers for breathing, hit reactions
• Bone masks for upper/lower body splits
• Independent blend modes per layer

Characters that move like they should.

Phase 5 performance systems:

• Level streaming with chunk-based worlds
• Object pooling for zero-allocation spawning
• Hi-Z occlusion culling (GPU compute)
• Shadow caching for static geometry
• Texture + mesh streaming on demand

Big worlds, small budgets.

More visual polish:

• TAA with YCoCg variance clipping + CAS sharpening
• SSR with Hi-Z acceleration + temporal filtering
• Lens flares with ghosts, halos, chromatic aberration
• Imposter system for distant LODs (octahedral billboards)

Every frame looks better now.

Volumetric everything.

• Clouds: Ray-marched Perlin-Worley noise. Stratus, cumulus, cumulonimbus. Weather-driven.
• Fog: Froxel-based. All light types. Shadow-aware.
• God rays: Screen-space radial blur with CSM integration.

Atmospherics that rival AAA studios.

Current status:

• Version 0.3.0
• 59% AAA feature coverage
• 250+ API commands
• 1,036 tests (100% passing)

We're building in public. Follow along as we forge the future of #gamedev

More to come.

What's in the box:

• PBR materials + cascaded shadows
• Skeletal animation with GPU skinning
• IK solvers (CCD, FABRIK, humanoid)
• Animation state machines + retargeting
• Ragdoll physics + joint systems
• NavMesh pathfinding + AI steering
• Client prediction + server reconciliation

The stack:

• Pure Rust (no mixed languages)
• wgpu rendering (Vulkan, Metal, DX12, WebGPU)
• Rapier physics (2D + 3D)
• Custom ECS-native networking with QUIC
• GPU-driven meshlet pipeline (Facet)
• Compute-based layered particle system (Ember)

Performance without compromise.

Our core philosophy: every engine operation must be programmatically accessible.

No dropdown menus. No "click here then drag there." No hidden state.

If an AI agent can't do it through an API call, it doesn't belong in Forge.

This isn't a limitation—it's a superpower.