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-

Thanks for the info Michael. Where can we follow the progress of this engine in the future? I am heavily interested in it.

And by the way: If you need any help, models or textures, just let me know. Dexsoft would be happy to support modern technology. And I personally would be interested in checking how my textures and models look with new tech like dynamic tesselation, ambient occlusion or global illumination.

My latest texture pack comes with all maps needed for modern renderers and are precisely generated from high poly geometry. So they would be perfect for tessellation as an example:

Here is a shot from the c4 engine:


We can talk about more detail via mail or PM.

Didn´t you tell us, that your plugin is nearly done, about one year ago and then in one thread after another again?
I mean, I understand that such stuff is actually very hard to realize and takes much more time then one may think, after it already basicly works, but yes just basicly and not really usable for a endusers of all kinds. But why do you already make big announcements without showing what you already archieved? I mean, if you have something to show, I´d love to see it, but as long as you´ve got just a basic idea of what you actually want to archieve, just keep it for you until it gets really serious. I also have great ideas for game engines and think, that I would even be able to realize them and may will somewhen, but I don´t tell people about features I can´t already show. At least, I know how to write a shader, understand most of the math and have some experience with OpenGL on Windows, Linux and the iPhone.
Oh and to complete your list, you should meantion, that you are going to develop a graphicscard accelerated, procedurally, but very artist friendly soundsystem as well as an for everyone easy to use MMOG capable networking solution. And am I right to assume that your engine will also have mode you can switch to, which will render everything with voxels instead of polygons, as well as the possibility to mix both?

I´ve seen in the past that you are basicly able to develop a shader, but it is very hard to take you really serious with all your announcements and only little coming out...
Please don´t be offended, I just somehow wanted to let you know.

To machinery_Frank - we would be delighted for Dexsoft to provide art for our engine and we can work out an agreement in private.

To Slin - I am sorry you are upset. But, we have actually spent hundreds of hours developing and researching technology for Iridium.

The reason why we kept on scrapping our versions was because we never achieved the performance we demanded. Eventually we decided this was not on our part, but from the fact that we were basically trying to "write a second engine inside of gamestudio." For example, we wrote our own code for rendering using the lowest level lite-c possible. We had our own classes and structs imported and using dlls. By the time we finished it was just too wasteful to have the gamestudio functions (which we made obsolete) running.

An example of this is the "FireFly lighting demo" which became our framework for the entire lighting system. Gamestudio was simply not designed to run in a deferred manor and, as many complained, the original fps was simply too slow for what was being rendered. This was also a problem with the "floating villa" demo (let alone my poor judgment in tuning the functions at the time).

Gamestudio isn't bad at all - it is just not the right platform for what we are trying to achieve. I would still recommenced Gamestudio to anyone interested in learning or beginning game programming.

-Mike-

@Slin :
Just switch to another game engine , why not, there are good alternatives instead of buying a plugin.

Even the Binary of Torque 3D is only 100$ now !
ANd the features are really great :

new Torque features

The Sketch tool is outstanding and lot of users with lightening are present and ready to use by a click !

It's only one example of engine , so why wasting time waiting for a plugin ? Personnaly i own A7 commercial: it's great for small games demos, i like it a lot !
I juts hope A8 willhave a real professional new interface like Unity and real physics with no problems, with compleet shaders ready to use with lightening !

O.o why should I? I mean, I don´t want to buy any plugin. And I am btw working with several different game engines, even though especially for shader related stuff I prefer gamestudio due to its flexibility in that area compared to all the others.

@Slin : ok, sorry !
I totally misunderstood like always !