Hedra
an open-world 3D game I wrote from scratch before LLMs
Details
- External ID
- 47377736
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Hydra
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- March 14, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 11
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6113161131611317
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
With the current inflow of LLM aided software, I thought I would share a cool "hand-coded" project from the previous era (I wrote this in highschool so roughly ~8 years ago).Hedra is an open world 3d game written from scratch using only OpenGL and C#. It has quite a few cool features like infinite generation, skinned animated mesh rendering, post processing effects, etc. Originally the physics engine was also written from scratch but i swapped for the more reliable bulletphysics.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Hardware & robotics
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- open-world 3d game
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Writing a custom 3D open-world game engine from scratch in C# and raw OpenGL with procedural infinite world generation demands deep computer graphics, linear algebra, and systems optimization expertise.
What it would actually take: Requires an OpenGL/Vulkan rendering pipeline built in C++ or C#, custom shader development (GLSL), octree/voxel spatial partitioning, procedural terrain algorithms (e.g., SIMD-accelerated Simplex/Perlin noise with marching cubes), and custom memory management for seamless chunk streaming. Implementing this without an existing game engine requires specialized domain knowledge in graphics engineering and real-time physics simulation.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 79 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #45 of 80 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 127 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Game Engine in Julia with 400KB Exports (Vs Unity's 200MB) · hn · 2026-02-17 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- 2D RPG base game client recreated in modern HTML5 game engine with AI · hn · 2026-03-10 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- I open-sourced my Steam game, 100% written in Lua, engine is also open · hn · 2026-03-06 · 65 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Shoot-em-up Deck Building game · hn · 2026-01-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.39
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Horizontal yet.