AetherFX

Game VFX that an AI agent can author. Describe an effect, or hand your agent a concept sheet, and it builds the effect from typed building blocks, looks at its own renders, and iterates. The result is one small JSON file that plays the same everywhere.

• A library of ready effects you can preview, tweak with sliders and export.
• A studio that runs locally in your browser: GPU preview at 60 fps, style sliders per part of the effect, playback and effect speed, search.
• Built for agents: every authoring action is a tool over the Model Context Protocol (MCP), with the guides an agent needs served alongside.
• Deterministic and portable: no shaders to write, no binary assets. Textures and meshes are procedural, and the same simulation runs in the studio, in exports and in your game through a small C library.
• MIT licensed, including every effect. Use it in commercial games.

Effects

Fire AOE	Lightning AOE	Arcane AOE	Holy AOE
Fire Bolt	Ice Bolt	Lightning Strike	Earth Shatter
Heal (+5 variants)	Teleport (+3 variants)	Poison Target	Ice AOE

Also in the library: Lesser Fireball, Shadow AOE, Void Nebula.

New and still being polished: Shield Buff (standard, ice, fire and poison, each in a basic and a rune style), Life Drain, Corruption Drain and Soul Drain (each as a flowing stream, a thin beam and a thick volumetric beam), Homing Arcane Missile, Chain Lightning, Meteor, Meteor Shower, Flame Wave, Frost Nova, Blink, Sword Strike, Lantern Light, Ambient Energy, Power Up (default, arcane, nature, void, fire and ice), Bandage (nature, holy, arcane and void), Level Up, Resurrect, Chimney Smoke, Campfire (smolder, low, medium, high and dying) and Fire Torch (wall, brazier, standing and handheld).

All of them live in examples/effects as plain JSON, and the scripts that generate the effect families are in tools/generators.

Quick start

You need CMake, a C++20 compiler and Python 3.10 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/holokat/AetherFX.git
cd AetherFX
cmake --preset default && cmake --build --preset default
python3 -m venv python/.venv && python/.venv/bin/pip install -e 'python[studio]'
python/.venv/bin/aetherfx-studio

The studio opens at http://127.0.0.1:8770. Pick an effect in the Library, drag the Style sliders, change the speed, orbit with the mouse. Built-in effects are never modified: you always work on a copy, and Save as adds it to your own list.

Use it with your AI agent

With the studio running, point any MCP client at it and ask for an effect. Whatever the agent builds appears live in the studio.

claude mcp add --transport http aetherfx http://127.0.0.1:8770/mcp

Open http://127.0.0.1:8770/mcp in a browser for the agent documentation: connection snippets for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and Codex, the authoring workflow, and every tool. Agents can read the same guides as MCP resources, or from /llms.txt.

The studio's own Generate box uses your Anthropic API key or your local Claude Code login if you have one. It is optional: everything else works without it.

Use effects in your game

Export	What you get	Status
Flipbook	Sprite sheet + manifest, plays in any engine	Ready
Package	Effect, resolved runtime data, baked textures and meshes	Ready
Unreal Engine	Package + the AetherFX plugin (UE 5.8): import and cast from an actor	Ready
Unity, Godot	The data package	Runtime not built yet: use the Flipbook for now

The engine also builds libaetherfx, a small C library that runs the same deterministic simulation inside your game. See docs/ENGINE_INTEGRATION.md and docs/UNREAL.md.

Contribute an effect

The Community view in the studio lists effects contributed by pull request, credited to their authors. Most people will let their agent do the work, so the guide is written for agents:

1. Build an effect with your agent and save it.
2. Run the contribution check: python -m aetherfx.community check your_effect.json
3. Open a pull request that adds community/effects/<name>.json.

Everything an effect must pass, what qualifies and what does not is in CONTRIBUTING.md. If you like the project, a star helps others find it.

Learn more

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: how the pieces fit
• docs/VOCABULARY.md: node types, parameters, texture ops
• docs/CONTROLS.md: style sliders and effect speed
• docs/AGENT_API.md: the tool API (CLI, JSON-RPC, Python, MCP)
• docs/COMMUNITY.md and docs/REVIEWING.md: the community collection
• docs/BACKLOG.md and docs/ROADMAP.md: what is missing and what is next

License and credits

MIT, see LICENSE. Every dependency is permissive and nothing proprietary is bundled: the audit is in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. All images in this repository were rendered by AetherFX from its own effects.

Started by Gene.