Features of "Glow" game engine

Highly optimized rendering system

• Deferred shading - allows hundreds of lights in frame
• All lighting is dynamic (including sun and skies)
• Weather and day/night model, light scattering model for sun
• Real-time reflective lights
• Pre-calculated ambient occlusion calculated on the global scale
• Per-pixel lighting, bumpy reflections and refractions, animated and detail textures, shiny surfaces
• Virtual renderer - allows several graphics API, currently DirectX 9, OpenGL.

Landscapes and foliage

• Image based landscapes
• Clipmaps
• Trees rendering optimization - distant trees became billboard
• Image based grass maps

Script bases particle systems

• By GPU Shaders
• Physical particles on powerful hardware
• Prepared fire, smoke, explosions and a number of other effects

Physics System powered by Intel Havok technology

• Integrated into game itself, including physical materials on all surfaces, physically driven sound.
• Rigid body constructions. Thousands of different physical entities simulated per frame.
• On powerful hardware engine implements physically correct behavior of particles such as smoke, debris, etc.

Highly optimized job system

• It uses thread pool.
• During startup, engine allocates number of threads, depends of available CPU cores.
• Several modules in engine (physics, AI, navigation, decoding of sound etc) send jobs to execute.
• Jobs from same module can not be executed in parallel (if it uses same data)
• Profiler - counts function execution time.
• Debug render - mesh, navigation, lighting, fps, AI

Audio system

• 3D sound positioning, spatialisation and attenuation
• OGG-vorbis compressed with adjustable quality, multi-threaded decompression
• Sounds can be downloaded from WWW

AI and Gameplay

• Efficient pathfinding for dynamic environment powered by Recast technology
• Navigation meshes are dynamic and can be updated by moving objects.
• Multi-layered animation system
• Hierarchical state machines
• Server side Lua scripts, with binding to everything - game objects, UI, AI etc

Optimized client-server

• UDP based, world state replicated by snapshots
• Bit-compressed data
• Client and server side physics.
• Client-side physics allows complex simulations over network.
• Delta-compression to send changed data only.
• Custom reflection mechanism to describe class members to be sent

Script based UI

• UI are drawn by script on server side
• Sending to render (or client) by render queue.

Data streaming from everywere

• HDD folder
• WWW streaming by curl library
• Streaming from zipped folders
• Loading big textures are delayed
• Memory pool optimization - 3x time optimization for small object

Web player

• ActiveX + IE now (other browsers later)
• Streaming data from Web