Imago

A fast, modern C# game framework. No editor in the way. Just C# you'll actually enjoy writing.

Imago is a 3D game framework for .NET. It ships with a forward renderer, a 2D sprite system, a retained-mode UI with over 50 controls, glTF/OBJ asset loading, input handling, and a developer console. Everything is written in plain C# that you can read, edit, and debug like any other .NET code. No editor, no content pipeline, no external tools between you and your game.

I built Imago for my game Medieval Life over several years. I'm extracting it so others can read it, fork it, and lift whatever's useful.

Features

• Forward 3D renderer with cascaded shadow maps, mouse picking, particles, gizmos, a sky dome, and an ImGui overlay for debug UI.
• Automatic draw-call batching with no per-frame allocations in the render path. Compatible renderables collapse into single instanced draws.
• 2D sprite and text rendering with an immediate-mode drawing API, alpha blending, and inline emoji support.
• Write GLSL, attach it to a C# class with one attribute, done. No visual shader graph, no content pipeline.
• Your shaders run on Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and Direct3D 11 without changes.
• Automatic shader variants for transparent, alpha-tested, wireframe, shadow-receiving, foggy, and other rendering modes.
• Retained-mode UI in the spirit of WPF, with measure/arrange layout, styles, data binding, and over 50 controls out of the box: panels, grids, docks, buttons, text, lists, scroll viewers, images, tooltips, popups, and more.
• UI templates written in XML with C# code-behind, compiled to type-safe partial classes at build time by a Roslyn source generator. Full IntelliSense, zero runtime reflection.
• MVVM-friendly out of the box. UI controls inherit from ObservableObject and commands bind naturally. Nothing forces MVVM on you.
• Assets: glTF 2.0 and Wavefront OBJ with skeletal animation, PNG and JPG textures with runtime atlasing, TTF and OTF fonts.
• Input: keyboard, mouse, and gamepad with event and polling APIs. Events route front-to-back through the UI so modal dialogs block input from the scene behind them.
• In-game developer console with commands, autocomplete, and history. Attribute-based command registration. One line to add it to your game.
• Scripted screenshots with Imago.ScenarioRunner: drive the game from a script, headless, and save what it shows.

Platforms

	Vulkan	Direct3D 11	OpenGL	OpenGL ES
Windows	✅	✅	✅	✅
Linux	✅	--	✅	✅
macOS	✅ (1)	--	❌	--

(1) Via MoltenVK.

Architecture

Projects:

• Imago: the framework itself. Application, rendering, scene graph, input, assets.
• Imago.Support: foundational types shared with consumers. Math primitives (Vector2Int, Rect, etc.), collections, colors, tweening, extensions.
• Imago.Gui: the retained-mode UI. Controls, layout, text, tooltips, and the mouse cursor.
• Imago.DearImGui: a layer that draws Dear ImGui windows on top of the game, for debug UI.
• Imago.DevConsole: the in-game developer console, built on the Imago UI.
• Imago.Generators: compile-time Roslyn source generators used internally.
• Imago.ScenarioRunner: an opt-in host that runs a game from a script and captures screenshots.

Requirements

• .NET 10 SDK
• C# 14

Building

dotnet build

No code generation step, no content pipeline, no external tools. If it doesn't build, that's a bug.

Acknowledgments

Imago is named in memory of my grandfather Armando, whose educational video production was called "Imago" (Latin for "image"). This project carries his name.

It also stands on other people's work:

• Veldrid by Eric Mellino, the cross-platform graphics library that shaped how I think about rendering in .NET.
• FontStashSharp for font rendering and text layout.
• SixLabors.ImageSharp for image loading.
• glTF2Loader for glTF parsing.

License

Imago is released under the MIT license.