hey,
Sorry for the lack of news and progress.
In the months past, I have assembled a small group of veteran programmers to assist me in creating the Iridium Engine. As I am still a student - most of the progress will be made over the Summer and you can expect the final product by the Fall.

Unfortunately, during our testing of the engine, we realized that many elements of Gamestudio's rendering engine were slowing down our own "plugin" engine. The amount of performance lost was unacceptable.

In addition, many features that we aimed for, such as "ground-breaking Ambient Occlusion," advanced animation techniques, and displacment mapping (and more of course) were not only hard to implement on GS but impossible.

With a lot of thought and discussion, we have decided to completely scrap the idea of a Gamestudio plug-in and write our own engine. Fortunately, we have the dedication, experience, and capital to do so.

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Iridium will now be an independent gaming engine using Microsoft's DirectX11 graphics API as well as OpenGL 3.2
Iridium will be programmed mainly in C++ with additional hlsl, glsl, assembly, and scripting language elements.

Iridium will also be platform independent, utilizing dx11 and OGL 3.2

Iridium will support older hardware (8000GT series or higher)
and have compatibility with DirectX9 and older versions of openGL.

Iridium will also take advantage of DirectX11's HARDWARE TESSELLATION. This will eliminate the need for complex bump mapping techniques as Iridium will use displacement mapping and adaptive tessellation for all geometry.

Iridium will also be one of the first independent game engines to support real-time ray-tracing for specular reflections.

Iridium will also dedicate a large portion of its allotted per frame processing time to computing extremely HIGH QUALITY AMBIENT OCCLUSION and GLOBAL ILLUMINATION effects. The quality of these will be comparable to cinematic results.

Iridium will also optimize processing for GPUs in Nvidia SLI or ATI Crossfire formats. Multiple graphics cards will greatly increase ambient occlusion and physics quality and performance.

Iridium will use Nvidia PhysX physics engine.

The animation engine will support advanced procedural and physical animations as well as traditional weighted bones and skeleton animation.



Thank you for following Iridium over the last few years.
We hope that our dedication and passion for advanced real-time rendering has served you well and we look forward to sharing our passion with you in the future.

-Iridium Development, Michael H. Auerbach-