Graphical Playground

Graphical Playground is an open-source platform for learning how modern AAA-grade graphics engines are actually built, together with the free C++23 engine, gp-engine, that powers it.

Two things keep most people out of graphics engineering today.

The first is hardware. Experimenting with real-time rendering usually requires a dedicated graphics card. Without one, you can read about a technique, but you can't run it, profile it, or see what happens when you change it.

The second is a knowledge gap. Free resources stop at the beginner level, and the material that explains what actually goes into a production engine, mesh shaders, virtualized geometry, ray tracing, the architectural decisions holding it all together, sits behind dense books or closed studio walls.

We're addressing both with an engine and a learning platform built to work together.

gp-engine is built around a deconstructive philosophy: every module is meant to be read, understood, and rewritten by whoever is studying it. Commercial engines are a black box by design; ours is the opposite. It targets both modern graphics backends (DirectX 12, Metal, Vulkan) and older ones (OpenGL, DirectX 11) across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, on open standards like Vulkan, SPIR-V, glTF, and OpenXR, so what people learn transfers directly to production work.

gp-platform delivers the curriculum and runs the engine in the browser through containerized cloud rendering, so a learner on a Chromebook can compile and debug a real Vulkan pipeline without owning a GPU. For anyone who'd rather not depend on a cloud subscription, the same platform also connects to an engine server running on their own hardware.

Every meaningful architecture decision, directory layout, language choice, memory allocators, our own math library, is written up and published as part of the curriculum instead of staying hidden.

Graphical Playground started as an EPITECH Innovative Project, built by five students who spent the last three years building game engines, emulators, and renderers together, from a CSFML-based engine and RPG to a hot-swappable arcade platform, a multiplayer engine with OpenVR support, and a cycle-accurate NES emulator. This project is where that experience turns into something built for other people to learn from.

We've put years of unpaid work into the engine, the platform, and the research behind the curriculum, and we still cover servers, domains, and cloud infrastructure ourselves. Sponsorship funds more of that directly: engine development, cloud rendering capacity for learners without a GPU, and time to write the deeper curriculum. We picked Open Collective because it makes that spending public, so anyone backing us can see exactly where it goes.

If you'd rather sponsor through GitHub, that page is also active at github.com/sponsors/GraphicalPlayground. Either way, thank you for helping keep the barrier to entry curiosity, and not the price of a graphics card.