Brahma is a 3D game engine with a rather retrofuturistic design, intended for small studios and solo developers. It's being written from scratch in C++ using standard Windows API and no third-party libraries. This technology introduces an entirely new class of low-latency real-time engines that make special timing requirements, treating frames as video fields with a target time budget of 2-4 ms each, down from 16-33 ms frame budgets normally seen in game engines. It evolves in a different way than other modern engines, rejecting conventional BSP, Z-buffer, floating-point coordinates, and most of the lame screen-space effects in favor of innovative and efficient techniques. The engine is non-Euclidean capable to some degree; also it supports true displacement mapping for sectors as a means to virtualize geometry that affects collisions. The engine is also carefully designed to be easy and convenient to develop for, yet versatile and adaptive to any needs.
Done first tests with lightmapping. Brahma lightmap is a logarithmic greyscale texture rendered as shade overlay with linear interpolation applied. Gonna develop single-pass lightmapped texture rendering routine to speed things up.
Everything you wrote down under Description (on the right) is a complete mystery to me, lol. In the buildengine there was just light everywere, no shadows. Will this be different in your engine, and will light maybe even be dynamic (so shadows can move)?
Leon
Brahma rendering pipeline is quite flexible, so it can render simple sector-based constant shading like Build engine, or it can employ more elaborate lightmapping. I plan to do lightmap-based dynamic lighting, so each surface will have a precalculated static lightmap and a dynamic version, over which dynamic light sources could be rendered. Another approach is lighting 'imprinted' into the main texture, which is fastest, but it uses a lot of memory and can't handle HDR rendering and dynamic lights well.