Khora Engine

An engine that thinks.

Khora is an experimental real-time game engine, written in Rust, built on a Symbiotic Adaptive Architecture: every major subsystem is an agent that knows its own cost, weighs its options, and negotiates for a slice of the frame budget — each tick. A central observer watches thermal headroom, frame-time stutter, battery, and GPU pressure, and trades budgets with the agents through a protocol called GORNA. The agents adapt; the work continues.

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

Choose your path

This documentation is organized around what you came to do. Pick a starting point — each path is a guided thread, not a pile of chapters.

🎮 I want to build a game

You want a window, a camera, and something moving on screen — fast. The engine handles the performance problem; you focus on the creative one.

Start with Your first game. It takes you from a clean clone to a running scene you can fly around in, step by step. From there, the How-to guides are task-sized recipes (“load a mesh”, “play a 3D sound”, “save a scene”), and the SDK overview maps the public surface.

🧠 I want to understand the engine

You want the ideas: why an engine would negotiate with itself, how the layers fit, what CRPECS and GORNA and AGDF actually are.

Start with The big idea. The Concepts section is the “why” — the philosophy, the architecture, and one explanation page per subsystem. Read it in order, or jump to the Glossary when a term is unfamiliar.

🔧 I want to contribute

You want to extend the engine — a custom agent, a new lane, a backend — or work on the internals.

Start with Get set up, then take the Architecture tour for a guided reading order. Extending the engine is a worked tutorial; the conventions and rules are the constraints we hold to.

In a hurry?

git clone https://github.com/eraflo/KhoraEngine.git
cd KhoraEngine
cargo build
cargo run -p sandbox        # the demo — a scene you can fly around

Then open Your first game to build your own.

Status

Khora is experimental. The foundational architecture, the CRPECS ECS, the GORNA negotiation loop, six intelligent agents, an editor with play mode, and a large workspace test suite are operational. The SDK surface is intentionally narrow and grows as the engine matures. The Roadmap lays out the multi-year path; the Open questions chapter is honest about what is still undecided.

When the engine changes, this book changes in the same commit.

An engine that thinks. A book that says so plainly.