Untold Engine Adds Gaussian Splatting Support

The Untold Engine, an open-source 3D engine built in Swift and powered by Metal, has rolled out its most significant rendering update yet with full Gaussian Splatting support across macOS, iOS, AR, and Vision Pro. The feature now runs inside the Untold Editor and on device across Apple platforms.

The addition of splats has been on creator Harold Serrano’s roadmap for over a year. When he gathered the time to focus on the implementation this fall, the system came together quickly. While the first release still leans on Bitonic Sort for depth ordering and does not yet include Spherical Harmonics lighting, the renderer is functional across the full runtime stack. Performance improvements will arrive with the planned transition to Radix Sort and additional lighting features later this year. However, its renderer already includes support for physically based materials, image based lighting, and modern post processing. Gaussian Splatting now sits alongside these systems as a native, Metal driven rendering path.

The update lands at a moment when radiance field techniques are rapidly expanding from research workflows into engines designed for real time experiences.

Alongside splats, the latest release introduces a runtime scripting system based on a lightweight domain specific language rather than an embedded scripting language. Developers write scripts directly in Xcode, attach them to entities through the editor, and reload them while the engine is running. The update also includes the engine’s first macOS build pipeline, allowing developers to export scenes, assets, and scripts into an App Store ready application. Support for iOS and visionOS builds is already under way.

These features arrive on top of recent architectural changes that separated the engine core from the editor, introduced systematic testing, and tightened the project’s workflow. The overall vision has been a stable, performant, developer friendly 3D engine that lowers the friction of building games for Apple platforms. Untold already runs across macOS, iOS, and visionOS, offers a fully modular Swift Package Manager structure, and remains licensed under LGPL-3.0 to encourage open collaboration.

The long-term roadmap reflects the same ambition. Serrano plans to enhance physics and collision systems, deepen lighting capabilities, expand XR and input support for visionOS, and streamline workflows between the engine, editor, and asset pipeline. A packaged distribution called Untold Engine Studio is also in development. It will ship as a single .dmg containing the engine, editor, and dependencies, reducing setup time for developers who want to begin building immediately.

With native Gaussian Splatting now part of its rendering stack, Untold Engine steps more fully into the emerging era of radiance field game development. For developers exploring photorealistic scene reconstruction or novel view synthesis inside Apple’s spatial computing ecosystem, the engine now offers a clean, open source foundation built for experimentation and increasingly for production.

Learn more here.