2026 updates

Balaur went from its first commit post in August to a tagged 0.1.0 in September, still pre-alpha. New this year: Balaur Script, Sponza, soft bodies, 2D global illumination, benchmarks and an editor on any screen.

Scripting

Balaur Script is the engine's own language: typed .bs files with Rust's syntax, compiled to WebAssembly. On wasmtime it takes about 1.5× the time of Rust. It replaces Rune.

Rendering

• Running Sponza — sky lighting, ambient occlusion, glass, mirrors and reflection probes
• 2D global illumination — soft light and soft shadows
• Normal-mapped sprites and 3D particles
• Batching — nodes that draw alike go to the GPU as one call

Physics

• Soft bodies — cloth, rope and tearing on Rapier
• Concave 2D colliders and follow controllers
• Physics playback — record a run, play it back, run rollback from inputs alone
• Benchmarks — about 3× Godot Jolt and 11 to 18× Godot Physics on twelve physics cases

Editor

• Any screen — a desktop, a tablet or a phone, and the browser
• Themes that follow the system, and a window that edits them
• Project manager and the Gamend dock

Everything else

• Tile maps, bone animations and shape primitives
• Widgets and themes, menus and tables
• Mobile export and a smaller web template, 5.1 MB brotli