dont worry, it's not just for GTG. you'll be able to get your hands on it
check this thread for more info: http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showgallery&Number=246180#comments

All the pictures look like running around after 15 can of beer ^^

The truth is, that I don't see anything special in this screenshots. Only some specularity and this annoying edge blur. I know that I have not an eye for shaders so I don't know where I should look at...

Maybe a video (without edge blur please!!!) can show me what this screenshots should show?

I really appreciate all the work you put into this, so please don't understand this as negativ critism! But you should improve the quality of the screenshots because they simply don't show enough and I guess you have enough to show

@dark samauri, he also has dynamic shadow mapping, ssao, and im not sure, but i believe he said something before about deferred shading so that he can have more lights efficiently.

Ok, but it's hard to see all that in those blurry screenshots.

A video with showing all those features seperatly would be cool

Edit: What I forgot to ask:
Is this "engine" a collection of shaders like Shade-C, or a plugin like Sphere or something different?
And how does all that work? What parts are still done by the acknex engine and what did you replaced? Why do we still need acknex or could Iridium be a stand-alone engine?

well from my understanding he did both, mixing a little plugin with shader work like with shade-c. even if it was standalone it would still only be a graphics engine and not include physic/sound/networking.

hey,
The edge blurring can be disabled or tuned down easily so don't worry. Its actually atmospheric scattering, but I tuned it up so you can see it better.

The engine is a plugin, like sphere, that replaces or builds upon every aspect of visual rendering found in the A7 dll/engine. ALL code, including shaders, were written by me.

Iridium offers improvments over the A7 engine in the following areas:

-Advanced Culling-Next generation portal and early-z culling combined with entity visibility tests greatly improve framerate in complex scenes

-Unified Architecture-All entites are shaded with one shader. This way, all objects can have any combination of any surface type by using "material textures" for per-pixel texture lookup

-Global Illumination-Real-time Ambient Mapping via SSAO and real-time radiosity lighting via instant radiosity.

-Atmospheric lighting-all "air" is lighted as well as surfaces. This procedurally creates god-rays, atmospheric scattering, fog, and other effects

-Mesh Based Objects-Lights,fog,particles,and atmospheric objects are controlled by setting flags and manipulating meshes - no need to call functions or learn new object types!

-Deferred Shading-Create scenes with dozens of lights per frame! Dozens of small lights take the same time to render as one large light!

-Unified Shadow Mapping-Create shadow casting spot, omni, directional, and ambient lights that are automatically managed and culled. Sunlight and atmospheric light are automatically created via a function call. You can easily turn on and off dynamic sunlight via portals and tracing.

-Soft Particles-Fast and effective depth clipping for all particles. Alpha blended particles are also supported.

-Advance Alpha-to-coverage-Advanced support for fullscreen transparent anti-aliasing.

-Advanced Enviromental Effects-Rain,Clouds,Water,Snow,Ice, and other effects are easily created through particles and per-pixel materials.

-Intuitive Wind and Foliage System-Wind is applied via a wind map. Apply a "flexibility map" to your entity to control how much different parts of your entity are effected by wind!

These are the primary features of Iridium. The plugin is approximatley 0.17 GB in size and will be compiled into a single dll or .c file. All code is closed source for personal use. You can contact me for a full license with open source code.

-Michael Auerbach-

Wow, sounds like you put an huge amount of time into this. So, what price can we expect?

What do you think about creating a high quality video with all those effects shown seperatly? I think a little promotion video would increase your sells alot
What I have in mind is something like the cry engine 2 video, or like all the other engines have for example unreal.

i vote for video too, but i had hard time persuading him to make one
hope you'll make one now :P

I have a question about how this plugin renders mucho grande amount of entities

I don't really get this one shader on all entities, does it sort them out depending on their material before rendering to do as little draw calls as possible, I remember when I used PIX to check some engines and they were horrible on this.
Also is it possible to implement instancing on irridum for tons of grass, trees and rocks to improve the fps even more, similar to sandbox 2 levels, if it's not already there I have no ideas how much the acknex SDK allows you do modify the engine but these are just some stuff I wonder

Thanks for your effort on this awesome stuff and peace out!

Not a video !

A running demo to test the thing in our Pc

Why not some menu to activate/deactivate shaders/lights in real time; just to see it's not baked !

A part from that , the shots show too much blurr, and last image shows full specualar on normal maps (old basic shaders) : any engine can do that !

Sorry ,i see nothing beautifull in those screen : i mean they are cool , but there is nothing new visually !

It would be as beautifull with Lightmaps !
And don't sure in an action game , you'll take the time to notice the difference !

Bring on a running demo (. exe file)
Well . . .