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Top 23 C++ Game development Projects
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I noticed that Godot Engine Apple Vision OS support is merged today. <3
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/105628
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InfluxDB
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Project mention: Ask HN: What are good high information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites) | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-05-08
I find the imgui UIs to be very high density (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui and the gallery issues) See for example the tracy profiler: https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy. It seems the game dev community has pretty powerful tools to understand and interrogate their work.
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Cocos2d
Cocos2d-x is a suite of open-source, cross-platform, game-development tools utilized by millions of developers across the globe. Its core has evolved to serve as the foundation for Cocos Creator 1.x & 2.x.
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3d-game-shaders-for-beginners
🎮 A step-by-step guide to implementing SSAO, depth of field, lighting, normal mapping, and more for your 3D game.
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Bullet
Bullet Physics SDK: real-time collision detection and multi-physics simulation for VR, games, visual effects, robotics, machine learning etc.
Physics and Game Engines: Implement high performance physics with Wasm-compiled versions of well established engines. For instance, Ammo.js is a Wasm version of the popular bullet physics engine written in C++.
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assimp
The official Open-Asset-Importer-Library Repository. Loads 40+ 3D-file-formats into one unified and clean data structure.
Curiously, what people commonly refer to as 'Waterfront OBJ' is merely a tiny subset of that format dealing with polygons.
The format supports e.g. higher order curves and surfaces and apps like Maya or Rhino3D can read and write OBj files containing such data. [1]
Writing a parser for the polygon subset also comes with some caveats.
If your target is a GPU you probably need to care for robust triangulation of n-gons and making per-face-per-vertex data per-vertex on disconnected triangles.
Vice versa, if you are feeding data to an offline renderer you want to absolutely preserves such information.
I believe the tobj Rust crate is one of the few OBJ importers that handles all edge cases. [2] If you think it doesn't, let me know and I will fix that.
This is surprising for people familiar with one but not the other of the requirements of offline- or GPU rendering.
I.e. if you write an OBJ reader this can become an issue, see e.g. an issue I opened here [3].
1. https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/obj/
2. https://docs.rs/tobj/latest/tobj/struct.LoadOptions.html
3. https://github.com/assimp/assimp/issues/3677
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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cocos-engine
Cocos simplifies game creation and distribution with Cocos Creator, a free, open-source, cross-platform game engine. Empowering millions of developers to create high-performance, engaging 2D/3D games and instant web entertainment.
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GameNetworkingSockets
Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption.
GameNetworkingSockets from Valve. Maybe not middleware enough? You have to implement the serialization and a state update strategy yourself.
Reliable & unreliable messages over UDP. Robust message fragmentation & reassembly. P2P networking / NAT traversal. Encryption.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
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o3de
Open 3D Engine (O3DE) is an Apache 2.0-licensed multi-platform 3D engine that enables developers and content creators to build AAA games, cinema-quality 3D worlds, and high-fidelity simulations without any fees or commercial obligations.
O3DE came from Amazon Lumberyard which came from CryEngine, so it's quite possibly one of the better looking open source 3D game engines that you can currently get, no strings attached: https://github.com/o3de/o3de
Sadly, you need to put in a lot of work to get good results out of it (neither of its predecessors had a reputation for being easy to work with) and for whatever reason many studios aren't exactly rushing to invest a bunch of time into it (many just go for Unreal Engine 5, or stick with Unity etc., indies often opt for Godot), so you don't get much past simple example projects. Part of this is probably that it never generated a lot of hype or much of a community around it.
Godot has a big community around it and is maturing pretty quickly, the early versions were pretty rough when it came to 3D (2.X and 3.X), but it's better now. Not as stable as Unity or Unreal but those have had the advantage of lots of years of work put into them, by more people than Godot has up until now.
There's also more niche options like Stride (https://www.stride3d.net/) and Flax (https://flaxengine.com/) but they suffer from the same issues as O3DE, even if otherwise are promising.
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JoltPhysics
A multi core friendly rigid body physics and collision detection library. Written in C++. Suitable for games and VR applications. Used by Horizon Forbidden West.
Project mention: Jolt: Physics and collision detection library, used by Horizon Forbidden West | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-03 -
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Look into learning LÖVE[1] and the Lua[2] programming language
[1] https://love2d.org/
[2] https//lua.org
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Project mention: Endless Sky: Open-Source Space Exploration, Trading, and Combat Game | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-29
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defold
Defold is a completely free to use game engine for development of desktop, mobile and web games.
Project mention: Free high-performance cross-platform game engine | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-18 -
Panda3D
Powerful, mature open-source cross-platform game engine for Python and C++, developed by Disney and CMU
A GitHub repository (like this one)
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NoahGameFrame
A fast, scalable, distributed game server engine/framework for C++, include the actor library, network library, can be used as a real time multiplayer game engine ( MMO RPG/MOBA ), which support C#/Lua script/ Unity3d, Cocos2dx and plan to support Unreal.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C++ Game development discussion
C++ Game development related posts
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Hlslpp: Math library using HLSL syntax with multiplatform SIMD support
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OpenJK: Game and Engine Powering Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast
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The Level Design Book
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Planetfall
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Free high-performance cross-platform game engine
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3D Game Shaders for Beginners
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Show HN: My non-vibe-coded game engine
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A note from our sponsor - InfluxDB
www.influxdata.com | 12 Jun 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Game development projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Godot | 97,797 |
| 2 | imgui | 66,091 |
| 3 | Cocos2d | 18,568 |
| 4 | 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners | 18,498 |
| 5 | Bullet | 13,421 |
| 6 | assimp | 12,001 |
| 7 | tiled | 11,767 |
| 8 | entt | 11,140 |
| 9 | cocos-engine | 8,730 |
| 10 | GameNetworkingSockets | 8,705 |
| 11 | o3de | 8,303 |
| 12 | JoltPhysics | 7,969 |
| 13 | Recast/Detour | 7,034 |
| 14 | love | 6,696 |
| 15 | endless-sky | 6,600 |
| 16 | Piccolo | 6,248 |
| 17 | defold | 5,109 |
| 18 | Panda3D | 4,803 |
| 19 | SHADERed | 4,483 |
| 20 | NoahGameFrame | 4,073 |
| 21 | imgui-node-editor | 4,006 |
| 22 | ActionRoguelike | 3,992 |
| 23 | lumixengine | 3,624 |
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