List of C++ game engines and frameworks

The most powerful game development platform is now available to everyone. Full engine source code. All features. No royalties. No obligations. No license fee.

Unreal Engine is a professional suite of tools and technologies used for building high-quality games across a range of platforms. Unreal Engine’s rendering architecture enables developers to achieve stunning visuals and also scale elegantly to lower-end systems.

Revolutionary new workflow features and a deep toolset empower developers to quickly iterate on ideas and see immediate results, while complete C++ source code access brings the experience to a whole new level.

Unreal Engine technology powers hundreds of games as well as real-time 3D films, training simulations, visualizations and more. Over the past 15 years, thousands of individuals and teams and have built careers and companies around skills developed using the engine.

Godot Engine is a feature-packed, cross-platform game engine to create 2D and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of common tools, so that users can focus on making games without having to reinvent the wheel. Games can be exported with one click to a number of platforms, including the major desktop platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows), mobile platforms (Android, iOS), as well as Web-based platforms (HTML5) and consoles.

FEATURES

Visual editor, full of mature tools.
Uncluttered UI, with context-sensitive editors.
Amazing scene system, supporting instancing and inheritance.
Friendly content creation interfaces for artists, level designers, animators, …
Visual shader editing for 2D and 3D.
Persistent live editing (changes are not lost after stopping the game). Live editing on mobile devices!

Torque 3D is a easy-to-use game creation platform. Architected from the ground up for maximum flexibility and performance across a wide range of hardware and built upon the Frontline award-winning Torque Game Engine Advanced, Torque 3D comes equipped with a full suite of tools and APIs to get your game to the finish line, no matter what your goals. Add publishing paths to PC, Mac, Xbox 360, Wii, iPhone, and the web, and you have the power to distribute games almost everywhere they are played.

Esenthel is a next gen, cross-platform C++ game engine that comes with a lighting fast, high performance game engine with advanced graphics and physics and support for multiplayer and UNLIMITED size worlds which is make the engine well suit even MMORPG titles. Also comes with an integrated level editor that is designed from the ground up to be able to collaborate with others in real time even online through network connection. Also comes with a built-in code editor that simplify coding in C++ greatly by integrating the code editor with the engine and remove the need to create header files and we can compile the same code for all supported platforms.

Flax Engine is claimed the most agile game engine. It's open source, cross-platform and it lets you write scripts in C++ and C# seamlessly. Also focused on lightweight development. A true game changer.

Lumix Engine is an open-source 3D game design software and engine. It's written in C++ and supports several scripting languages.

FEATURES:

• PBR, HDR, deferred rendering
• Lua Scripting
• JavaScript scripting
• Animation system
• Audio
• Physics by NVidia PhysX
• Navigation
• GUI
• Unity-like WYSIWYG editor
• Different postprocesses: DOF, GodRays, Tonemapping, Film Grain, SSAO, FXAA, ...
• Fur shader
• Particle system

Create, play and share fun games on your PC with absolutely no technical knowledge needed!.

Leadwerks Game Engine provides the smoothest learning curve to take you from beginner to full-fledged game developer. Use the visual editor and the flowgraph system to set up game interactions without code. Use Lua to write your own game scripts. Advanced users can even program in C++ with the Professional Edition. Leadwerks Game Engine uses an OpenGL 4 deferred renderer to display detailed scenes with real-time lighting at maximum speeds to power desktop and VR games.

AppGameKit is a simple cross platform game development tool that runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS and Raspberry Pi. A version to run on Android and iOS is also available. With AppGameKit you can use a simple Basic like programming language to develop cross platform applications, 2D and 3D games and deploy to many platforms such as Windows, Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, HTML5 and even develop AR and VR applications for desktop and mobile without need to change any of your code. The same code runs everywhere. The best part is, you can preview and run your application on the target device right from the IDE through WiFi with access to all device features such as camera, sensors and touch. It is allow you to test your applications on the target device at any point during development without need to manually compile, export and install it on the device.

You can also use C++ to code your applications to get better performance or implement 3rd party libraries and tools and even add your own features and share it with the community if you want. This is how it become possible to use community made implementations of AppGameKit to code in C#, Python or any other languages. Some of the extra features available today are also developed by 3rd party using the C++ library and offered as a DLC to add even more functionality.

Wicked Engine is an open-source game engine written in C++. The main focus is to be easy to set up and use, light weight, high performance, and graphically advanced. The full source code is provided with the MIT license, which means, anyone is free to use it for anything without additional considerations.

Powerful, mature open-source cross-platform game engine for Python and C++, developed by Disney and CMU.

Urho3D is a lightweight, cross-platform rendering and game engine implemented in C++ and released under the MIT license. Greatly inspired by OGRE and Horde3D.

raylib is a game development library highly inspired by Borland BGI graphics lib and by XNA framework. Made as a simple and easy-to-use library to enjoy game programming.

FEATURES

• NO external dependencies, all required libraries are bundled into raylib
• Multiple platforms supported: Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android... and many more!
• Written in plain C code (C99) in PascalCase/camelCase notation
• Hardware accelerated with OpenGL (1.1, 2.1, 3.3 or ES 2.0)
• Unique OpenGL abstraction layer (usable as standalone module): rlgl
• Multiple Fonts formats supported (XNA fonts, AngelCode fonts, TTF)
• Outstanding texture formats support, including compressed formats (DXT, ETC, ASTC)
• Full 3D support, including 3D Shapes, Models, Billboards, Heightmaps and more!
• Flexible Materials system, supporting classic maps and PBR maps
• Animated 3D models supported (skeletal bones animation)
• Shaders support, including model and postprocessing shaders.
• Powerful math module for Vector, Matrix and Quaternion operations: raymath
• Audio loading and playing with streaming support (WAV, OGG, MP3, FLAC, XM, MOD)
• VR stereo rendering support with configurable HMD device parameters
• Huge examples collection with +95 code examples!
• Bindings to +25 programming languages!

The Irrlicht Engine is an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderers, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines. We've got a huge active community, and there are lots of projects in development that use the engine. You can find enhancements for Irrlicht all over the web, like alternative terrain renderers, portal renderers, exporters, world layers, tutorials, editors, language bindings for java, perl, ruby, basic, python, lua, and so on. And best of all: It's completely free.

OGRE (Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine) is a scene-oriented, flexible 3D engine written in C++ designed to make it easier and more intuitive for developers to produce applications utilizing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. Since 2001, OGRE has grown to become one of the most popular open-source graphics rendering engines, and has been used in a large number of production projects, in such diverse areas as games, simulators, educational software, interactive art, scientific visualization, and others.

Cube 2: Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer/singleplayer first person shooter, built as a major redesign of the Cube FPS.

Much like the original Cube, the aim of this game is not necessarily to produce the most features & eyecandy possible, but rather to allow map/geometry editing to be done dynamically in-game, to create fun gameplay and an elegant engine.

cocos2d-x is a cross platform open source free 2D game engine for mobile gamedev, that is fast and stable, easy to learn and use.

Torque 2D is an extremely powerful, flexible, and fast open source engine dedicated to 2D game development.
Torque 2D includes the complete C++ source code to the engine and many example toys. It also includes access to TorqueScript, our scripting language which allows developers to write the same gameplay logic on Windows or OS X and have it work on the other platforms!
Torque 2D's powerful rendering is perfectly suited to achieving a great looking artistic style. Torque 2D's graphics API includes implementations for all types of hardware and operating systems
Torquescript is a fast and easy to use C++ like scripting language that ties all of the various elements of a project together. It supports a large complement of functions including math, object manipulation, fileIO, and more.

Allegro 4 and Allegro 5 are cross-platform, libraries mainly aimed at video game and multimedia programming. They handle common, low-level tasks such as creating windows, accepting user input, loading data, drawing images, playing sounds, etc. and generally abstracting away the underlying platform. However, Allegro is not a game engine: you are free to design and structure your program as you like.

SFML (Simple and Fast Multimedia Library) is a portable and easy-to-use API for multimedia programming.

nCine is a cross-platform 2D game engine in C++ for fast and performant game development.

Oxygine is completely free and open source (MIT license) 2D game engine, available on GitHub. It is written in C++ and runs on MacOSX, iOS, Android, Windows and Linux.
You can also build and run your C++ Oxygine application in web browsers. It won’t require any plugins, such as Flash, and runs as pure HTML5/JS application using WebGL for rendering.
Oxygine is developed to be fast and memory efficient on mobile platforms. It has flexible resources management system, automatic sprites batching, memory pools and more.
It provides easy to use API, which is designed with "do more with less code" philosophy. It uses a managed scenegraph system that takes care of rendering and updates, and provides ability to extend with custom rendering and updates.
You can analyse your application with embedded tools. Inspect in runtime scenegraph, loaded textures, FPS, performance and more.

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."