Khora Engine

An engine that thinks.

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Khora is an experimental real-time game engine written in Rust, built on a Symbiotic Adaptive Architecture (SAA). Every major subsystem is an intelligent agent that negotiates for resources in real time. A central observer — the Dynamic Context Core — watches the engine's behavior, runs nine heuristics each tick, and trades budgets through a protocol called GORNA. The agents adapt; the work continues.

Most engines decide at compile time. Khora decides at runtime, every tick.

Why

Modern engines are rigid. They assign fixed budgets at compile time and adapt poorly to hardware diversity. Khora replaces that with a council of intelligent, collaborating agents — automated self-optimization, strategic flexibility, goal-oriented decisions. The result is an engine that runs the same code on a workstation, a laptop on battery, and a Steam Deck — and adapts each tick to keep the frame rate.

Status

Active development. The foundational CLAD architecture, the CRPECS ECS, GORNA v0.3, and five intelligent agents (Render, Shadow, Physics, UI, Audio) are operational. ~470 workspace tests pass on every commit. An editor with play mode is shipping. The roadmap commits to a multi-year horizon — culminating, in Phase 6, in a native physics solver replacing the third-party backend.

Quick start

git clone https://github.com/eraflo/KhoraEngine.git
cd KhoraEngine
cargo build
cargo test --workspace
cargo run -p sandbox        # Run the demo
cargo run -p khora-editor   # Open the editor

Documentation

The full documentation lives in docs/ as an mdBook.

Read this	If you want to
Introduction	Understand what Khora is and why
Principles	Read the SAA philosophy in depth
Architecture	See where SAA becomes CLAD
SDK quickstart	Build a working game in 50 lines
Editor design system	The visual language of the editor
Roadmap	What is committed, what is planned

Build the book locally:

mdbook serve docs/ --open

Architecture at a glance

khora-sdk        Public API — Engine, GameWorld, Application
khora-agents     Five agents — Render, Shadow, Physics, UI, Audio
khora-lanes      Hot-path pipelines — render strategies, physics steps, audio mixing, asset decoders
khora-control    DCC orchestration, GORNA protocol, Scheduler
khora-data       CRPECS ECS, components, scene definitions
khora-io         VFS, asset loading, scene serialization
khora-core       Trait definitions, math, GORNA types, ServiceRegistry
khora-infra      Default backends — wgpu 28.0, Rapier3D, CPAL, Taffy, winit (swappable)
khora-telemetry  TelemetryService, MetricsRegistry, monitors
khora-macros     `#[derive(Component)]` proc macro
khora-editor     Editor application

Every backend in khora-infra implements a trait from khora-core. wgpu, Rapier3D, CPAL, Taffy are current defaults, not architectural commitments — alternative backends drop in as new sibling folders without touching the rest of the engine.

For AI coding agents

Khora ships with provider-agnostic agent instructions:

• CLAUDE.md — Claude Code entry
• AGENTS.md — Codex / Aider / Cursor / Continue entry
• .github/copilot-instructions.md — GitHub Copilot entry
• .agent/ — Single source of truth: rules, conventions, architecture brief, eight specialist personas

Community and contributing

• Read the Code of Conduct and Contributing Guidelines.
• Join discussions on GitHub Discussions.
• File bugs or feature requests as Issues.

License

Khora Engine is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.