A Performance-Focused ECS Engine for Vehicular Action Games
Steer Engine is a custom high-performance game engine built entirely in C++. Designed from the ground up to eliminate the overhead of monolithic toolsets, it leverages the explicit graphics control of Vulkan, the rigorous data-locality of Flecs ECS, and the deterministic physical simulation capabilities of Jolt Physics.
The engine currently powers a fast-paced bicycle action game requiring high-speed collision resolution and physics-driven mechanics.
- Language: C++
- Graphics API: Vulkan (Dynamic Rendering)
- Architecture: Flecs (Entity-Component-System)
- Physics: Jolt Physics
- Audio: Miniaudio
- UI/Tooling: Dear ImGui
| Subsystem | Key Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Renderer | Physically Based Rendering (PBR), Cascaded Shadow Maps (CSM), Screen Space Reflections (SSR), SSAO, and multi-pass Bloom. |
| Architecture | Pure ECS paradigm ensuring high-performance entity management with negligible CPU bottlenecks and optimized memory contiguity. |
| Physics | Jolt Physics integration featuring a specialized Vehicle Constraint system for robust and tunable bicycle control alongside deterministic rigid-body resting states. |
| Tooling | Custom UI framework leveraging ImGui for real-time visibility into ECS states, rendering batches, and specialized runtime debugging. |
| Assets & Animation | Dynamic GLTF model loading and native support for complex humanoid skeletal animations using compute skinning and Inverse Kinematics. |
Click the image above to watch the full high-resolution engine showcase.
Click the image above to view the full PDF poster.
Read the full Steer Engine Group Report (PDF)
Developed by Sicheng Chen, Samuil Georgiev, Qidan Guo, Junxian Li, and Chenghao Zhu under the supervision of Rafael Kuffner dos Anjos at the University of Leeds.