Taos Engine — Building a Modern WebGPU Game Engine

This book explores real-time graphics programming through the lens of Taos Engine, an open-source WebGPU game engine written in TypeScript.

How the book is organized#

This book builds the engine: a reusable WebGPU foundation that is not tied to any particular game. It starts from the WebGPU API, builds up a complete deferred HDR renderer, and then adds the game-engine layer on top — components, input, audio, UI, networking, and physics — before closing with performance and tooling.

Topic	What we build
WebGPU fundamentals	Device, queue, buffers, textures, bind groups
Shader authoring	WGSL — vertex, fragment, compute
Render graph architecture	Multi-pass deferred rendering
PBR lighting	Directional + point + spot, IBL, BRDF
Shadow algorithms	Cascade shadow maps, VSM, spot shadows
GPU particle systems	Compute-based spawn/update/compact, billboard rendering
Post-processing	Bloom, TAA, SSAO, DOF, tone-mapping
Game engine design	Component/entity system, scene graph, input, audio, UI
Networking	WebSocket transport, message protocol, authoritative server
Physics	Rigid bodies, collision layers, ray casts, character controller
Performance & tools	GPU timestamps, async compilation, culling, sample framework, asset pipeline

Companion books#

Games built on the engine, and subsystems big enough to deserve their own treatment, live in companion books. Each one assumes this book as background and links back into it wherever it builds on an engine system.

Book	What it covers
Computer Graphics: Past to Present	The fundamentals of computer graphics
Crafty: Building a Voxel Sandbox Game	A full game built on Taos Engine — block voxel terrain, player physics, NPC AI, game UI, weather, audio, multiplayer gameplay, world persistence
Heightmap Terrain	Continuous terrain — CDLOD, virtual texturing, GPU-driven indirect drawing
Geospatial Streaming	Planet-scale streaming — 3D Tiles, quantized mesh, screen-space error, floating origin
Sample Deep Dives	Long-form walkthroughs of the larger sample programs

How to read this book#

The canonical companion is the Taos Engine. Each chapter cross-references the relevant source files — you are encouraged to open them side-by-side.

Code blocks are either annotated excerpts (showing the key logic) or complete listings (the entire file). Excerpts use // ── ... ── markers to indicate elided boilerplate.

src/block/chunk.tsTypeScript

class Chunk {
  readonly cx: number;       // Chunk X index
  readonly cz: number;       // Chunk Z index
  readonly blocks: Uint8Array; // 16 × 256 × 16 = 65,536 blocks

  getBlock(x: number, y: number, z: number): BlockType;
  setBlock(x: number, y: number, z: number, type: BlockType): void;
}

The Taos Engine philosophy#

No black boxes. The renderer and the engine core are built from scratch — they import only the WebGPU API and the standard library. A few subsystems deliberately lean on established libraries where rewriting them would teach little: rigid-body physics runs on the Jolt engine compiled to WebAssembly, and mesh and texture compression use their reference decoders. Wherever we use a third-party library, we explain why, and how it fits behind a Taos Engine interface.