Hey all, I''m a Computer Science/Software Dev. student from Australia and I''m working on a game engine in my spare time called vEngine (Vast Engine). At the moment it''s just heightmap based terrain, but it will be extended to eventually encompass indoor rendering also aswell as the none gfx side of things. Anyway, I just put a site up a couple of days ago and there is finally some shots and other things there worth looking at. http://www.crosswinds.net/~mindhive/ Any constructive comments on the site design and the screenshots (positive or negative) are more than welcome. Thanks in advance for taking a look!

Hey dude,
Like it says on his site, it''s raytraced.

BTW, it looks really nice, keep up the good work!

Anonymous:
My shadows are ''baked'' onto the base texture at texture generation. What I do is I start from the x,y,z coordinates of every pixel on the texture relative to the heightmap and trace them back along the light vector. If at any stage the y value for a point is less than the relative height value then it is considered a collision and the point is shadowed. If ray is traced outside the bounds of (0,0,0) and (255, 255, 255) without intersection then the point is lit. Once the texture is synthesised and lit I do a 3x3 multisample of every point primarily to eliminate the effect of texture scaling, this also provides the shadows with a nice ''soft'' effect.

The algorithm is extremely effective and quite realistic but is too slow to be done at compile time. When I create my level editing tool the textures will be created within that, for the moment I''ve made a simple console application that takes the relevant parameters. The program has many limitations that need to be addressed, but my priority is getting the engine more functional, not making the graphics prettier. Atleast not for the moment

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