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Windows is the primary development platform for Prisma Engine. The engine ships with a DirectX 12 rendering backend as the Windows default, and Vulkan is available as an opt-in alternative. The editor — an ImGui-based scene inspector — is built on Windows by default and uses the Vulkan backend when the PRISMA_BUILD_EDITOR flag is set. All three build targets (engine, editor, runtime) are covered by CMake presets that work from the command line or directly from Visual Studio 2022.

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Requirements

Install the following tools before building.
  • Windows 10 or later — Windows 11 recommended for DirectX 12 feature level 12_2
  • Visual Studio 2022 — with the “Desktop development with C++” workload (includes MSVC and CMake integration)
  • CMake 3.20 or later — bundled with Visual Studio 2022, or install separately
  • Vulkan SDK — required if you enable the Vulkan backend via PRISMA_ENABLE_RENDER_VULKAN
The project uses CMake FetchContent by default to download all third-party dependencies (SDL3, ImGui, GLM, VMA, vk-bootstrap, and others) at configure time. You do not need to install them manually unless you set PRISMA_USE_FETCHCONTENT=OFF to switch to vcpkg.

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Available presets

All Windows presets target the x64 architecture and use the Visual Studio 17 2022 generator. The engine target builds the core library only — no editor, no runtime app. The editor target adds the ImGui debug UI and is the target to use during active development. The runtime target builds the standalone player for shipping games.

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Build commands

Run configure and build as two separate steps. The preset name is the same for both.
Build output lands in build/<preset-name>/. For example, the release editor outputs to build/editor-windows-x64-release/.

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Rendering backends

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DirectX 12 (default)

DirectX 12 is the primary rendering backend on Windows. It is enabled by default for all Windows presets via the PRISMA_ENABLE_RENDER_DX12 CMake option. No extra SDK installation is required beyond the Windows SDK that ships with Visual Studio.
Shader sources for the DirectX 12 backend are in resources/common/shaders/hlsl/.

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Vulkan (opt-in)

Vulkan is available on Windows and is the backend used by the editor target. Enable it by setting PRISMA_ENABLE_RENDER_VULKAN=ON. You must have the Vulkan SDK installed and VULKAN_SDK set in your environment.
Shader sources for Vulkan are in resources/common/shaders/glsl/. The Vulkan adapter lives in src/engine/graphic/adapters/vulkan/.
The editor preset (editor-windows-x64-debug / editor-windows-x64-release) enables Vulkan automatically. The ImGui debug overlay requires the Vulkan backend to be active.

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Key CMake flags

Pass these via -D after the preset name to override defaults.
The XAudio2 audio backend (PRISMA_ENABLE_AUDIO_XAUDIO2) is currently disabled pending an interface refactor. SDL3 audio (PRISMA_ENABLE_AUDIO_SDL3) is the active backend on Windows for now.

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Conditional compilation

Engine modules are gated by preprocessor defines that mirror the CMake flags. Use these guards in your own code when writing Windows-specific logic:
All available PRISMA_ENABLE_* options are defined in cmake/DeviceOptions.cmake.