Engineered with creative and technical freedom in mind, the Vision
Engine allows you to easily create your own rendering pipeline,
integrate the physics system of your choice, or write your own animation
code. Additionally, Trinigy´s game engine provides a large set of
convenient high-level and low-level helper classes to make customization
as easy as possible.
At the same time, an extensive set of out-of-the-box features reduces
the development time and cost of your project. Lights and shadows,
radiosity, animations, normal maps, particles, post-processing and much
more - all these features are right at your fingertips once you have
installed the Vision SDK.
High-Performance, Highly Stable Rendering
The Vision Engine´s rendering core has been designed for performance and
stability, allowing highly detailed, realistic scenes to be rendered
with maximum visual fidelity.
Shipped with complete source code, the default rendering pipeline serves
as an ideal starting point for your game project, providing an
extensive set of fully integrated features such as:
Normal maps, specular color and specular exponent maps, and virtual
displacement maps
Radiosity-based, normal-mapped illumination with light grid and light
maps
Dynamic illumination with advanced dynamic shadowing techniques,
configurable attenuation, projected lights, and much more
Shadow maps, variance shadow maps, and cascaded shadow maps
Powerful multi-threaded particle engine
Overlay and GUI rendering
HDR and post-processing
Efficient instancing system for static and dynamic geometry
Powerful large terrain solution for vast, streamed landscapes, including
Level of Detail support, holes in terrain, and seamless integration
with complex indoor scenes.
The Vision Engine uses a combination of efficient visibility culling
techniques - including hardware occlusion query, portals, and
quadtrees/octrees - to achieve consistently high frame rates.
Engine Extensibility
The SDK ships with many plug-ins that extend the core engine´s feature
set. These plug-ins can easily be customized and extended and include:
Physics bindings, i.e. the Vision Engine´s own physics system can easily
be replaced by 3rd party physics using the game engine´s physics
interface
Other 3rd party middleware integrations such as Kynapse AI or IDV
SpeedTree
Advanced visual effects such as volumetric lights and volumetric shadows
Particle and cloth simulation including forces, many emitter types,
customizable constraint types, and collision geometry
Cinematic playback
Sound modules with full support for 3D sound and sound occlusion as well
as streaming on all platforms.
A comprehensive LUA-based scripting solution, which is fully integrated
into the SDK´s WYSIWYG workflow.
Powerful Animation
The Vision Engine´s powerful animation system provides support for many
of the animation methods in Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya. Optimized
quaternion-based skeletal animations, morphing deformers, and vertex
animations provide the basis for smooth, lifelike character animations.
Skeletons and animation setups can be shared across meshes in order to
save memory, while the sharing of animation results across entities
allows for high-performance mass scenes with little performance impact.
Fully configurable animation trees makes dynamic layering and blending
of arbitrary animations extremely easy. In keeping with the philosophy
of creative and technical freedom, the Vision Engine additionally allows
you to define your own vertex and bone modifiers, resulting in an
extremely flexible animation setup.
Depending on the requirements of your game, animation can either be
performed on the CPU, the GPU or the PlayStation 3´s SPUs, with many
platform-specific optimizations ensuring optimal performance
characteristics.
Customizable Streaming
The Vision Engine provides a powerful yet easily customizable streaming
solution that is an ideal solution for vast yet highly detailed
landscapes and large indoor/outdoor environments. Almost all resource
types can be streamed in the background, including geometries, terrain,
textures, shader libraries, animations, and much more.
Streaming is fully integrated into the Vision Engine´s scene editor,
vForge, with its completely intuitive WYSIWYG workflow.
Optimized Platform Performance
The Vision Engine has been designed to provide exceptional high
performance with a small memory footprint on all supported hardware
platforms. A hand-tuned system of platform-specific optimizations
ensures that both modern PCs and game consoles realize their maximum
potential. Among the features accounting for the Vision Engine´s high
performance are:
Batching of primitives and elimination of redundant state changes
Scalable effects and Level of Detail
Efficient visibility culling system
CPU-specific optimizations (ISSE, 3DNow!, AltiVec)
GPU-specific optimizations (memory export, vertex fetch, instancing,
etc.)
Efficient cross-platform multi-threading architecture makes it possible
to fully utilize the potential of current and future multi-core
platforms, including multi-core PCs, Xbox360, and PlayStation 3.
The game engine´s multi-threading systems allow easy distribution of
computing tasks across multiple CPUs/SPUs or hardware threads with very
little overhead, thus taking full advantage of modern symmetric and
asymmetric multi-core processors. Demo applications based on the Vision
Engine have been chosen by Intel to demonstrate the performance benefits
of computers with four and more CPU cores, yielding an almost linear
performance gain.
In order to facilitate game-specific memory and performance
optimizations, the Vision Engine ships with a convenient runtime
profiling framework and provides a powerful resource management and
analysis system. Performance bottlenecks can be easily identified and
removed, while unused resources can be automatically purged and
recreated.
