Introducing Mirror Engine

Welcome to Mirror Engine! I’m excited to show you our first public video. Mirror Engine is our v2, a complete rebuild of Mirror Classic. We’re onboarding select users to our Alpha. Apply by either:

1. Discord or
2. Sign-Up Form

Mirror Engine is packed with features and much more to come:

• Everything’s mirrored: Multiplayer sync in real-time. If it’s in-world, it’s there for everyone (unless you tell it otherwise). Mirror Engine manages the intricacies of netcode for you. All you have to do is make your game!
• AI Text-to-3D: Right-click “Generate” and type what you want to create, such as a sports car. Mirror Engine creates a Gaussian Splat of whatever you imagine in ~60 seconds.
• Entity Component System, ECS: Our initial “Space Object” approach with Mirror Classic was trying to fit an ECS mindset into a heavy inheritance structure (Godot). A dedicated ECS approach from Day 1 will be a far better fit, prioritizing composition over inheritance.
• Defaults: Mirror Engine is opinionated and will give you sensible defaults, such as a rendered cube, collision, and physics when creating a new entity.
• Materials library: Thousands of textures: diffuse maps, normal maps, height maps, ambient occlusion maps, and more.
• Gaussian Splatting: The sports car is a 3D Gaussian splat, part of radiance field rendering for high-quality, even photorealistic real-time 3D. Importantly, this Gaussian splat was not cleaned at all (it's typical to clean gaussian splats before using), hence why it has some graphics oddities. We'll add splat touch-up tools in the future.
• Mesh creation: Separate from GSplats, you can create simple mesh primitives with Mirror Engine, so you may never need a 3D modeling tool like Blender. It’s a simple primitive system right now and we’ll add much more in the future. This was a key feature that deserved more focus during the Mirror Classic days.
• Asset management: Materials, textures, gsplats, meshes, and more are all streamed for real-time creation without needing to worry about transmitting assets yourself.
• Lights: Flexible lighting out of the box that perfectly works with your materials.
• Land: More info to come here; it’ll be fun! A unique twist.
• Camera: Surprise, I accidentally ran into an issue where my camera settings are oversaturated BUT this was my in-game camera, not my physical camera. Mirror Engine comes with native post-processing camera effects to create immersive games and worlds (cutscenes were edited with video software but the other parts are all the engine).
• Action: Build Mode and Play Mode: Like the movie Inception, build worlds in real-time with your friends and press “B” to swap to Play Mode. For example, if you’re building an Elder Scrolls Skyrim-like RPG, you can pause action entirely, tweak your Fus Ro Dah shout, and continue the fight right where you and your entire party left off.

More features are already partially implemented and will be released in the coming months, such as:
• Scripting in real-time (not visual scripting; implementing coding was our #1 feature request after we released visual scripting with Mirror Classic. Let us know if you’d like visual scripting in the future!)
• Particles, as you’ll see in the video; those are in-engine.
• Play Mode: Only Build mode is available at the moment and soon you’ll be able to immediately hop between Building and Playing in real-time.
• Scene management: Multiple builders all in different scenes simultaneously creating the game world.
• Physics: Static, kinematic, and dynamic rigid bodies
• Publishing: No need to worry about platform craziness: Just click to instantly release to players.

If you’re new to game dev, you’re in the right spot! Don’t worry if some of the above is confusing - Many tutorials are coming and please feel free to leave a comment and @ me on X and Discord.

This is an alpha, so expect bugs and loud computer fans.

I’m excited to hear what you think - Cheers!

Jared

Disclaimer: Mirror Engine is not affiliated with any car company and does not claim to be. If there is appearance of likeness of a brand, it is unintentional. Asset generation is used for educational purposes only.

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