also, i would like to share some questions that people emailed and messaged me:

q: "When will Iridium Engine be available?"
A: At this point in time I really don't know. Sorry.

q: "Does each light overide the previous light's shadow like in regular gamestudio?"
A: No. Iridium's unique design allows for an impressive number of shadow casting dynamic spot, directional, omni-directional, and shape lights to ALL cast high-res dynamic shadows all at the same time. Shadows can be limited in number or update frequency to allow for greater fps on slower machines.

q: "This [engine] is impressive but what is the framerate?"
A: The framerate depends on the graphics settings. On minimum settings, Iridium runs at about 1/8 speed of standard Gamestudio (no shaders). At maximum settings, Iridium runs at about the speed of Crysis on "Highest" settings. On a mid-high end gaming PC, expect 60 fps for a standard scene.

q: "What does this mean "deferred shading"?"
A: Deferred Shading is a process that reduces the amount of rendering required to completley draw a scene. The main view renders the scene's color, material properties, normals, and depth into 3 render targets which are then used to complete the shading in a Post Processed view (which only requires a pixel shader). Iridium has a backup to standard rendering for GPU's that do not support MRTs.

q: "Can I use the dynamic lighting with light maps?
A: Yes. However, Iridium must be initialized so that it knows to render lightmaps in addition.

q: "Real-time radiosity is not possible with 1 million polygons."
A: Not true. Iridium uses rasterization to handle radiosity. Usually ray-tracing is used. Because rasterization uses visibility data - once we calculate a bounding area of effect over the camera (which includes some invisible objects) we only need to bounce light between these objects. In addition, light bounces are only done 4 times per frame. After each bounce hits a surface, a coresponding view is placed and is used to add illumination to the pixels in it's frustrum. This continues for any number of bounces and is spead up by using colorWriteEnable = false (this makes rendering 3 times faster). We also do not need to retrieve the onject UV coordinates which speeds up the rendering by 2 times. Plus, we only need to write to a single channel buffer which speeds up rendering by another 2 times. Overall, we can render the ENTIRE scene's radiosity in the same amount of time and cost as rendering the scene 1.5 times without any shaders (default GS).

please feel free to email any other questions you might have
-Mike-

This is hard to say. I need to see a demo, a video, the tools in action, the work-flow and a few nice images to really understand the value of this product. It sounds great but the shots still look not professional enough to be amazed.

The descriptions sound really very impressive. But you need some cool videos and demos to prove that this is really the case.

After checking this it would be more easy to give you an idea, how much this is worth.

If you need some help how to setup a more interesting lighting for your scenes then just let me know.

Hey,
It is final! Iridium will be available for purchase following the release of our demo for Ground Tactics! This may still be a few to several weeks. I will also create webspace directley pertaining to the engine either on our game website or on another website. I will let you know when this opens. Also, I will release the API manual and a demo for free (at the same time as release) so that you can examine the performance and quality in real-time. The manual will also be helpful for developer's to see the wide variety of functions that allow both complete graphics "noobs" to professionals to correctley add iridium to their projects. Hopefully the demo will also help you help me find a good selling price. -Mike-

Awesome to hear! Also nice to hear the tactics demo is coming soon!

hey,
so right now I have a complete version of the 4.0 engine which is really only adequete for outdoor levels (it has an artificial light limit because I set it up with "hard" variables instead of expandable pointers. I am working dilegently to get version 5.0 up asap. In addition, I am writing a VERY extensive manual in .chm format. The main improvements over version 4.0 are the expandable light limit, a revised rendering architecture that is about 25% faster with a large number of lights, and the ability to include "sub scripts" within the engine.

The sub scripts are basically pixel fragment shader functions (written in HLSL vs/ps 3.0) which can be defined with the engine to modify the output of the rendering. This was added because the engine does not normally support one's own shaders due to the required MRT outputs. Instead, the user can set mltiple variables such as PSdiffuse or VSposition which then compile the given shader functions to allow for greater customization. For example, one could use the PSdiffuse variable to set there own function to render the diffuse term in a "cartoon shader" style. This may not be included in version 5.0 but will definatley be included in one of the newer versions to come afterwords.

-Mike-

alright, I have VERY exciting news! I am working on implementing various cinematic lighting effects directley into Iridium! So far, this has made Iridium look 100% original from almost every other engine - plus, if you don't like it, you can simply turn it off

If you want to see what the cinematic HDR lighting looks like, check out this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173484(VS.85).aspx

I will obviously post some screens soon, and maybe even an UHDR demo

Features that are now included/improved are:

-real-time dynamic HDR with dynamic exposure. You can also control the rate of adjustment.
-real-time high-quality blur/bloom based on UHDR to HDR overflow.
-real-time "star effect" which basically creates glare artifacts dynamically (see the link above)
-real-time halos
-real-time chromatic dispersion
-real-time glare
-real-time diffuse reflection (global illumination term).

I have made this addition in a seperate script and I can't wait to see the results combined with the actual engine! All the above features run at about 60 fps and I can eliminate 4 entire views which will greatly increase fps!

Let me know if there are any other additions you would like to see in Iridium. I still have volumetric rendering, sub-surface scattering, and atmospheric scattering to implement. I also have to fix up the script to support additional lights,shadows,etc and the manual - then you can get your paws on Iridium

-Mike-

Awesome. This is getting so good i can't wait. Is there a price set yet?

not yet - I may do something like a small price for development and then if the Engine is used commercially, another liscence must be purchased. But I'm still not sure.

Ok,
So I've been REALLY busy the last few weeks. I just got accepted to MIT and UMD CS schools so I was looking around for apartments, rooming, etc. Plus I had exams XD
Anyway, I'm getting back into the Iridium project and I am starting the final release version today. I also added some pretty cool refraction effects that can be used for water, glass, etc. The refraction is also interesting because it is done in a seperate stage (that only renders refractive objects) and allows for alpha-blending so that a refractive object overlapping another will result in a correct double/triple (or even more) refraction effect. Its really quite cool XD
I'll kep you posted here for any updates - Mike-

congratz on getting accepted.