Engine Features
all shots taken on my vanta + celeron433, usually at 1152x864x16 + resized to 800x600 thus
they might appear to be a bit antialiased. these shots are taken approx in order of creation.
thus the later ones give a more truer state of how the engine currently is.
mail
Flexibilty
practically everything is treated the same,
ie unlike most(all) games the game doesnt differentuate between a rock, a building, a person or the ground.
Of course this does incur a framehit but it results in a lot more power and flexibilty.
Speed
10 quake3 guys at nearly 20fps on a vanta! (no LOD involved), even with 40 q3 models this non hardware t+l card.
still managers over 10fps
Shadows
realtime soft shadows!
tools
heres a shot of the 'map making' program, it differs to most map making programs
in that it lets u move around the world in realtime altering things seeing how the final level will look like.
note - each tree is individually shaded, though the method will prolly change if me
gets access to a hardware t+l card. its time to give lightmaps a good rogering once + for all
volumetric fog
the fog actually swirls around after seeing this in action,
static fog after this seems pretty shagged
same place, with an extra light turned on and different colour fog
now using the fog to give a sense of being underwater
procedural textures
this is pretty standard fare nowadays
PVS
(the circled spot is the player as in when the camera was until I froze the pvs) not the best shot at all but its the only one I have on the HD, im to shagged at the moment to rustle up a better one ie why wait hours for the PVS to generate on this machine
when i could generate it in a tenth of the time (or less) with a fast athlon + hardware t+l card.
A word of advice for any programmeurs out there. PVS is great for landscapes, even on flatish terrain its amazing how much doesn't need to be rendered
FRIEMEL
Im expecting this to be the next big thing with games, after detail textures the next logical step is detail objects (friemel), the objects can be anything rocks,grass,plants etc. btw the grass waves,ripples,moves (whatever grass does u know when wind blows on it) sweet as effect, basically the same applies to the fog even if the movement aint 100% physically realistic having the grass wave,ripple is infinitly choicer than having it static
archangel in the sun, turner
procedural generated objects
no two trees in the world are the same! (better lighting to come)
why settle for the low polygon trees of halo/unreal2 when u can have these little beauties, and yes the leaves do rustle in the wind.
procedurally generated rocks/wood/kina (not coloured)
COMING NEXT
Im working on something at the moment that'll make all the above pale in comparison. stay tuned :) though I dont expect to be able to unveil it for at least 6 months
other less interesting stuff of the engine
indoor/outdoor environment, detail textures, caustics, particle systems, caves/overhangs, lensflares
what this engine doesnt do YET!! (partly due to me not having a capable graphics card + partly due to time constraints)
per pixel lighting (shadows/bumpmapping)
far higher polygon counts
per blade grass, bushes etc that get crushed (and bounch back) when someone walks upon them
environmently mapped stuff like water with reflections
much better physics, i want bones, i want it so ppls arms/legs etc dont portrud through walls etc, this of course means im gonna have to rewrite my collision detection code which took months to write, oh happy happpy joy joy
credits
Roger [666] Bacon the crusader model
ID software the hunter model
Darren Pattenden the horny model
Mike and Bill Jukes the massacre model
Thomas "SchwimmelPuckel" Sorenson the massacre skin
archangel in the sun, turner
