Manual Overview

The manual covers the systems you actually use to build a game. Each page is practical, covering what the system is, how you drive it from the editor or a script, and where its edges are.

Lumina is editor-first and data-driven. You build scenes from entities and components, author looks with materials and lights, and write gameplay in C#. The editor and the game run on the same runtime, so what you see while editing is what ships.

Systems

Section	Covers
Editor	The workspace, viewport, panels, content browser, asset editors, and profiling tools.
Entities & Components	The world model: entities, components, and how they compose.
Worlds & Coordinates	Worlds, the coordinate system, and transforms.
Prefabs	Reusable entity templates, instances, and per-property overrides.
Terrain	Heightmap terrain, sculpting, layer painting, and foliage.
C# Scripting	Gameplay in C# against a typed API, with in-editor hot reload.
Rendering	Materials, lights, environment, shadows, and post-processing.
Materials	The material graph, instances, and best practices.
Cameras	Camera components, rigs, and shakes.
Water	The water component and buoyancy.
Particles	GPU particle systems and the module stack.
Physics	Rigid bodies, colliders, collisions, characters, and destruction.
Gameplay Tags	Hierarchical tags for classifying entities, filtering, and message channels.
Animation	Skeletal meshes, animation graphs, notifies, root motion, and ragdolls.
Navigation	Baking a navmesh and driving agents along paths.
Networking	Net modes, roles, replication, and hosting a session.
Audio	Sources, buses, mixing, and audio settings.
Assets	What assets are, importing, managing them safely, references, cooking, and packaging.
Reflection	Making your own types visible to the editor, serialization, and scripts.
Logging	Log levels, the console, and where log output goes.

Where to start

New to the engine? Read Installation, then Your First Project, then the First-Person Tutorial.

Already comfortable in another engine? Start with Entities & Components and C# Scripting; those two differ most from what you are used to.

Working on the engine itself

The manual stops at the API surface. If you are modifying the engine rather than building a game with it, the Engine Internals section covers the C++ subsystems: the application lifecycle, the threading model, the object and reflection systems, the RHI and render pipeline, the editor’s architecture, and the build system.