Aether Engine

A Godot fork for XR, built around one simple concept; XR games should feel and look good without the cost of performance.

Artwork © Kennaness — NO AI training. NO reproduction. NO exceptions.

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Godot 4 forkC# + Arch ECSzero subviewportsXR-firstFree forever

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What is Aether Engine? — An Intro To Aether Engine

First

~20

Worldspace UI Elements

Default Templates

Free to use, forever.

The problem

The current solutions for developing in XR aren't enough.

WalkerDev here.

While building the XRUIOS I went shopping for an engine. Beyond Unity I tried Unreal, S&Box, Stride3D, Godot, Evergine and a handful of others. They all looked great at first — and every one of them fought me the moment I pushed on XR.

Unity had the license mess. Unreal had the performance handling. But the issue that actually mattered showed up nearly everywhere: world-space UI is built through a subviewport. The engine draws your interface flat onto a texture with the GPU, then pastes that texture onto a plane floating in the scene. That's fine for a normal game. For something like the XRUIOS, it doesn't work out. I also don't think it's the best way to handle UI in 3D (That would be Unity's Canvas System).

So I decided to make my own game engine. Sorta.

CATAPHRACT — companion character art — **CATAPHRACT** — The Aether Engine Mascot!

The decision

Why a Godot fork?

Aether Engine is that engine — a Godot fork that adds the handful of things XR actually needs. But if I write C#, wouldn't Stride have been the obvious pick?

I thought so too, at first. Then I came to the realization that Godot was the easiest engine to mod while still holding the best performance for what I was after. Stride would have been an uphill battle the whole way; Unreal was never going to hit the numbers I wanted. Godot let me get in, change what I needed, and keep the speed.

The brief

The Four Pillars To A Great Engine

Everything in Aether is measured against these.

Look as good as possible

Aether Engine games should be able to look their absolute best — full-fat rendering, no compromises forced by the platform.

Run fast

Performance is non-negotiable, especially when you're rendering the whole world twice for a headset.

XR & 3D first

Spatial and 3D aren't bolted on afterward — they're the default the whole editor is built around.

Easy to use

If you're coming from Unity or Godot, you should feel at home on day one.

Take the feature tour → How it differs from Godot

Built on it

An engine is only as good as what you make with it

Aether Engine comes with a few features and showcases built to show you what's possible with it, alongside more on the way.

The Plaza Scene - One Of Three Templates In Aether Engine — **The Plaza Scene** — One Of Three Templates In Aether Engine

戦

◆ AetherCombat

Tactical Combat

Halo 1 esque smart fighters with real line of sight, morale, per-bone hits and committed swings. Built for Masuki Quest.

Explore combat → ☺

♡ AetherLife

Life & Interaction

LLM/Text sandbox with characters that have needs that drain, objects that advertise what they offer, and a body you can just talk to. Built for Echoes Online.

Meet the sim →

The deal

Free, forever — with a singular catch.

Aether Engine will be open source and free for commercial and personal use, forever.

There's no sponsor system and no donate button — but also no roadmap owed. We're not building a community or trying to take your money. We're' building the engine we need to make the XRUIOS, and hoping it helps people who are tired of the current options for making XR work.

Why not upstream to Godot? This is one piece of a much bigger project, and I'm not interested in the bureaucracy that comes with upstreaming. My focus is the XRUIOS, Masuki Quest and Echoes Online; this way, the team and I can focus on what we think are the most important additions.

— WalkerDev

Walker Industries