SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives Learn more →
Top 23 C++ Gamedev Projects
-
I personally find Go miles easier than Rust.
Is this the ultimate reason,Go is fast enough without being overally difficult. I'm humbly open to being wrong.
While I'm here, any reason Microsoft isn't sponsoring a solid open source game engine.
Even a bit of support for Godot's C#( help them get it working on web), would be great.
Even better would be a full C# engine with support for web assembly.
https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/70796
-
CodeRabbit
CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers. Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
-
The user interface has been entirely developed using immediate mode gui dear-imgui library, with the ImGui.NET wrapper. This allows for a fast and bloat free experience but, at the same time, harder customization for a task of this size, since the library isn't really suited to the development of end-user applications. On the other side, it's what I'm most familiar to work with.
-
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.
-
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.
-
bgfx
Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic, "Bring Your Own Engine/Framework" style rendering library.
Project mention: Bgfx: Cross-platform, graphics API agnostic rendering library | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-01-08 -
Project mention: Rust: Doubling Throughput with Continuous Profiling and Optimization | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-02-14
I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for but I found https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy to work rather well. There is an integration for the tracing crate that can get you very far: https://lib.rs/crates/tracing-tracy. If you're just looking for a very high level report then this might be a bit too much detail.
-
Project mention: Using Jolt with flecs & Dear ImGui: Game Physics Introspection | dev.to | 2024-04-17
EnTT is a popular alternative to flecs for C++, which has different performance/memory characteristics.
-
SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
Project mention: Endless Sky: Open-Source Space Exploration, Trading, and Combat Game | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-09-29
-
Early this year, I did game development with Love2D engine (relies on Lua language) and was inspired by its approach, so decided to make something similar myself for the competition.
-
-
defold
Defold is a completely free to use game engine for development of desktop, mobile and web games.
-
Panda3D
Powerful, mature open-source cross-platform game engine for Python and C++, developed by Disney and CMU
A GitHub repository (like this one)
-
Project mention: Spine – 2D skeletal animation for games, with physical secondary motions | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-08-19
That's not what you wrote here
https://github.com/EsotericSoftware/spine-runtimes/issues/20...
-
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.
-
-
-
Project mention: Terrain3D: High performance, editable terrain system for Godot 4 | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-11-20
-
Some other Rust game engines ship with their own physics engine. Fyrox, for example, has advanced 2D/3D physics, supporting rigid bodies, joints, ray casting and more. Godot too, which has community-led Rust bindings also has an in-built physics engine as well as a Godot-native extension using the Jolt physics engine. In fact, which is reported to be more performant than the official physics engine.
-
-
-
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++ Gamedev discussion
C++ Gamedev related posts
-
A Library for Point and Click Adventures
-
Easy to use cross-platform 2D game library for C++
-
Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code
-
Show HN: First NetPanzer Release since 2017
-
What do you think about using a game engine for UI?
-
Bogus Software
-
Imgui Screenshot Gallery
-
A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 25 Mar 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Gamedev projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Godot | 95,350 |
| 2 | imgui | 63,939 |
| 3 | 3d-game-shaders-for-beginners | 18,498 |
| 4 | Cocos2d | 18,434 |
| 5 | bgfx | 15,545 |
| 6 | tracy | 10,997 |
| 7 | entt | 10,774 |
| 8 | cocos-engine | 8,490 |
| 9 | o3de | 8,120 |
| 10 | Recast/Detour | 6,832 |
| 11 | endless-sky | 6,415 |
| 12 | love | 6,253 |
| 13 | magnum | 4,914 |
| 14 | defold | 4,727 |
| 15 | Panda3D | 4,697 |
| 16 | spine-runtimes | 4,577 |
| 17 | NoahGameFrame | 4,035 |
| 18 | imgui-node-editor | 3,904 |
| 19 | GodotSteam | 3,160 |
| 20 | Terrain3D | 2,613 |
| 21 | godot-jolt | 2,374 |
| 22 | RuntimeCompiledCPlusPlus | 2,220 |
| 23 | crown | 2,199 |
Sponsored
CodeRabbit: AI Code Reviews for Developers
Revolutionize your code reviews with AI. CodeRabbit offers PR summaries, code walkthroughs, 1-click suggestions, and AST-based analysis. Boost productivity and code quality across all major languages with each PR.
coderabbit.ai