Quadrion Engine

Quadrion Engine is a ground up development from Shawn Simonson, Renato Ciuffo and Jonathan Bastnagel. Originally named Trinity Engine, the project was developed as an OpenGL accelerated graphics library which was used for rapid deployment of real time proof of concept demonstrations. Now named Quadrion Engine, the engine now parimrily utilizes Microsoft Direct3D9 technology as its primary subsystem. However, an OpenGL path still exists but is not frequently updated.

The engine is presented modularly via a small DLL allowing for project to project portability. A driver framework imports the engine backend while the game is implemented as a modular front end. This structure makes it incredibly easy to modify Quadrion Engine to suit the needs of the client programmer without needing direct access to the engine itself. The project is intended to be mod-community friendly.

The engine is almost fully shader based. The built in light prepass lighting model allows for up to 1024 dynamic lights of all different varieties. The engine also utilizes several different encodings for HDR which scales well to even the first DX9 level cards. The effects pipeline can be fully exploited (with the exception of SSAO) by Shader Model 2.x level hardware. While true floating point HDR is generally accepted as the highest quality offering, the engine will scale itself to cards that do not support floating point formats and can offer the entire effects pipeline on typical RGBA8 integer format textures, or alternatively on hardware where texture bandwidth is an issue.

The engine also makes use of a custom Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) technique which approximates ambient occlusion of surfaces by sampling offscreen depth buffers to approximate surface occlusion. Results are then blurred constrained by depth and normal divergence to arrive at a displayable and usable AO term in real time. This technique requires a Shader Model 3 capable video card (SM3), and is extremely efficient (>60FPS on GF7 level hardware at 1680x1050 w/ full lighting).

The engine supports hardware supersampling and multisampling for the full effects pipeline. The engine will use hardware CSAA/CFAA where available. The effects pipeline also allows for a custom anti-aliasing solution where hardware solutions are either not available or not efficient.

Overall, Quadrion Engine was designed to deliver the best and most efficient graphics for Windows based systems across a wide variety of hardware profiles. However, we are hobbyists. With that in mind, we are always looking for some good help and some constructive criticism.