Power and Flexibility

Don't let its extreme ease of use fool you. Underneath the hood, Leadwerks sports a beast of an engine, refined over years and tested with hundreds of games to deliver maximum performance and the flexibility to create any type of game.

Massive Performance

Leadwerks Game Engine uses an OpenGL 4 deferred renderer to display detailed scenes with real-time lighting at maximum speeds. The scalable engine architecture accomodates a wide variety of game types at optimal framerates with breathtaking visuals.

OpenGL 4.0 Renderer

OpenGL 4.0 Renderer

One graphics API runs predictably on all supported platforms and hardware, with no surprises and no excuses.

Entity System

Entity System

Object management, hierarchies, and space transformations are a breeze with our entity system.

Environment Probes

Environment Probes

Place environment probes in your scene for precise control of ambient lighting and reflections.

Deferred Decals

Deferred Decals

Deferred decals let you paint a scene with cracks, details, and splatters.

Realistic Characters

Realistic Characters

Hardware skinning with up to 256 bones and an advanced animation management system make your characters stand out.

Hardware Occlusion Culling

Hardware Occlusion Culling

Occlusion culling in Leadwerks is fast and automatic, with no need for hand-placed portals.

Groundbreaking Terrain and Vegetation System

Leadwerks features a unique terrain system that uses virtual textures to render the area around the player with details conventional texture splatting can't match. A revolutionary vegetation system allows you to populate landscapes with millions of trees, plants, and rocks, using almost no memory.

Customizable Post-Effects System

You can add any number of post-processing effects including bloom, volumetric light scattering, screen-space ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, and more. Choose from a variety of stock effects, download new shaders from the Workshop Store, or create your own effects in GLSL the built-in shader IDE.

Fast and Accurate Physics

Leadwerks uses Newton Game Dynamics for physics, providing the most stable real-time physics. Joints with limits and actuators can be used to simulate realistic movements without the spastic behavior typical of other physics engines.

Graphics

  • Deferred renderer with uniform lighting model
  • Up to 32x hardware MSAA
  • Vertex, pixel, geometry, and tessellation shaders
  • Normal mapping with specular
  • Clipmap terrain
  • Post-processing stack
  • Hardware tessellation
  • Cubemap reflections
  • Instanced rendering
  • Hardware skinning
  • Real-time mesh modification
  • Trilinear and 16x anisotropic filtering
  • Blend and transition animations
  • Extract animation sequences

Physics

  • Fast and accurate rigid body physics
  • Constraints including hinge, ball, and sliding joints
  • Motorized joints with limits
  • Generate physics shapes
  • Swept collision
  • Raycasting with lines or spheres

AI

  • Navmesh pathfinding
  • Crowd avoidance and steering
  • Navigation areas visible in editor
  • Physics-based character controller
  • Automatic AI following

Particles

  • Real-time particle editor
  • Emission volume shapes
  • Adjustable curve graph
  • Particle animation sheets
  • Velocity-based directional particles

Sound

  • 3D sound spatialization
  • Emit a sound from any entity
  • Automatic channel management
  • Skip to any time in sound

Networking

  • Peer-to-peer networking with Steamworks
  • Voice and text chat
  • NAT traversal
  • Public lobby system
  • Easily synchronize physics and animation