Welcome!

Hello there! Thank you for checking out Kerosene.

Note

AI Generated content disclosure: Most of these docs were made by AI. If you want to improve them, please do! All help to kerosene is greatly appreciated :>

Warning

Kerosene is 1.0.0 alpha. It works end to end, but its API may still change between alphas, and a finished game still needs things it does not have yet: see Missing features.

Hello! Welcome to the Kerosene documentation.

Have you ever used the Source engine? Have you wished it was open source and you could make a game with the same tools? With Kerosene, we’ve tried our best!

Kerosene is a Rust game crate for brush-built 3D games. You add kerosene to a Cargo project, implement one trait, and you have a game, with the editor and every compiler along with it. Everything builds from source on your own machine, so the same game builds on Linux, Windows and macOS. It is PURELY open source: GPL 3.0 with an exception that lets your game stay yours, so long as it says it is built with Kerosene.

cargo install kerosene --features tools
kerosene-tools new mygame
cd mygame
cargo play

Kerosene has, among other things:

Tip

This list is incomplete, please read the rest of the docs to get a full view of this engine’s capabilites.

• A Source-style movement solver, air-strafing and all
• Brush-based world geometry, compiled to a BSP tree with baked visibility, lighting and acoustics
• Physics props on Box3D
• Entity I/O, Rhai map scripting and a game UI
• Skeletal animation
• Saved games and level changes
• Steam: achievements, stats, leaderboards, cloud saves and the Workshop
• Chisel, a level editor, and a compiler for every kind of content
• And more!

Making a game? Start with Getting started, then Making a game, and read Publishing before you hand anything to anyone.

Working on Kerosene itself? The Documentation and the Devnotes are how it works inside.