Concepts

Warning

This section is still under construction. Articles are being actively updated and some content may be incomplete or out of date.

Deep-dive explanations of Portal Engine’s design, architecture, and the philosophy behind its development.
These articles explain the why behind design decisions to help you build a mental model of how the engine works.


Architecture & Design

Fundamental principles of the engine’s structure and execution flow.

Engine Architecture 🏗️

Overview of module layering, dependency rules, and how the module system enables decoupled functionality.

Engine Architecture ⚠️
Frame Lifecycle 🔄

A walkthrough of what happens each frame, including the separation of update and render phases.

Frame Lifecycle ⚠️

Core Systems

Deep dives into the internal workings of major engine systems.

Job System 🧵

Architecture of the task-based parallelism system, including coroutines and thread safety guarantees.

Job System
Resource Management 📦

How assets are identified, loaded, streamed, and managed across CPU and GPU memory.

Resource Management

Infrastructure

The tools and systems that support the development of the framework and games.

Build System 🛠️

Overview of the CMake-based build infrastructure and project management.

Buildsystem ⚠️