Our High Dynamic Range System is 4 times faster than solutions used in the other modern engines. We don’t waste memory bandwidth. All pixels are computed in 128 bit (96 bit on ATI) and converted to the screen format. Also all the post processing effects are computed in a full precision.
Soft particles
Improvement of the classical particles system. Instead of traditional 2D plane particles we use full 3D volumetric particles. The engine computes each screen pixel in 32 bit depth and uses it to create volumetric particles with many interesting 3D special effects.
Displacement mapping
To create best representation of detailed surfaces we use real displacement mapping computed per pixel. This technique allows us to put more details into the maps without additional triangles – we use ray tracing to simulate displacement effect. With displacement mapping we can simulate millions of triangles with occlusion in real time.
Projective lights
The engine supports two types of lights: standard with 2d texture and 360 degrees wide with cube-mapped texture. Each light can cast shadows and soft shadows with different resolutions.
All the lights can be animated together with its colors, brightness and other parameters. Each light can generate a “Flare” effect. In the Burn you can see projective lights on the maps and also on the map’s objects, even on the player’s weapon. Lights can use HDR textures.
Realtime lighting
The whole lighting system is computed in real-time. Of course to improve artistic effect it is possible to use lightmaps. The amount of light for each screen pixel is computed using all the lights, refractions and reflections and environmental CUBE lights. For each screen pixel we can calculate up to 5 specular effects and full diffuse lighting. We can even use CUBE lighting instead of traditional lighting model. CUBE lighting model calculates ambient, diffuse and specular (with glossiness on pixel shader 3.0 and 4.0 cards) Lighting works even on triangles with several normal maps. With ambient light areas our engine can transmit light through the doors connecting two rooms.
Alpha shadows
Our technology supports shadows cast by objects with transparent textures – opaque texels don’t cast shadows onto the surface.
Water/Glass effect
All the materials can be reflexive and refractive so we can make many different kinds of glass, water etc. This effect can be used on 3D objects, particles, volumetric particles and 2D images. This effect works well with displacement mapping and normal mapping and has amazing performance.
Post processing
The engine has an advanced post-processing system allowing composing many different effects. For example in the Burn we use following effects: glow, low health, player hurt, zoom, death, blur, radial blur, sepia. All the effects are completely independent.