Introduction

Lumina is a modern C++ game engine built on Vulkan. It pairs a data-driven editor with Luau scripting, an EnTT-based entity component system, a reflection system, and a forward+ renderer. It is built for learning real engine architecture and for prototyping on a clean, modular codebase.

This section takes you from a fresh clone to the editor running with your first project loaded.

What you will do

1. Build the engine from source.
2. Run the editor and create a project from its project browser.
3. Open the generated solution and launch the editor with your project loaded.

Supported platforms

Lumina is Windows only. There are no macOS or Linux builds, and none are planned. Everything below assumes a 64-bit Windows machine.

Requirement	Details
OS	Windows 10 (1803 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit
IDE	Visual Studio 2022 with the MSVC v143 toolset (17.8 or newer)
GPU	A GPU and driver supporting Vulkan 1.4
Git	Any recent version

Note

JetBrains Rider also works, but it is not required. The project templates ship Rider run configurations next to the Visual Studio ones.

Caution

Lumina is under active development, so APIs change. If you hit a build issue these docs do not cover, ask on Discord or open an issue.

Ready? Continue to Installation.