Turian is live — a 3D game engine built entirely in Zig
Turian now has its own home: turian.mass4.org.
It's a component-based 3D game engine and editor built entirely in Zig — one language for the engine, the editor, your game logic, and the build toolchain, with no garbage collector and no revenue share.
What's working today
Turian is early. It covers a useful subset of the basics — import, scenes, components, build — and is not comparable to a mature engine yet:
- Turian Studio — a visual editor with a scene hierarchy, inspector, asset browser, and a GPU-accelerated 3D viewport via SDL3 (Vulkan, Metal, or D3D12 depending on platform).
- Components are just structs — add
pub const is_component = true;to any Zig struct and it shows up in Add Component with its public fields editable in the inspector. The engine parses real Zig source directly, not regexes or annotations. - Live script discovery — drop a
.zigfile into your project'sassets/folder, hit Refresh, and your component is immediately available. No codegen, no build step. - Asset pipeline — OBJ, glTF/GLB, PNG, and JPEG import, with full PBR materials: metallic-roughness, normal maps, emissive, occlusion, all the maps.
- Headless builds —
turian-cli buildcooks your assets and links a single self-contained native binary, identical to what the editor produces and fully CI-friendly.
The roadmap ahead
Milestones ship usable leaps, not feature dumps:
| Milestone | Focus |
|---|---|
| Playable Game | input, audio, physics |
| AAA Workflows | Play Mode, gizmos, undo/redo everywhere, drag-and-drop |
| Real 3D | glTF material import, mip-mapped textures, KTX2, multi-light shadows, color management |
| Rich Content | animation, prefabs, particles, LOD |
| Production Ready | a stable, documented release with an upgrade path |
The live milestone tracker shows exactly where things stand.
Where it fits in MEGA4
Turian sits at the top of the stack. Its editor is planned to eventually become a plugin for Gaya, with Guinevere as the GUI layer underneath — the same architecture that powers the rest of the initiative. The first real game built with it is Mystery.
Try it
The dedicated site has the getting-started guide, install instructions, and a frank assessment of every subsystem's current state. Free software under GPLv3.