Voltaico Engine:

The Voltaico Engine is a video game engine that I have been developing for several years as a way to learn the intricate details of video game programming. During this learning process, the engine passed through several versions, being re-written from scratch several times, until it reached its current state of maturity.

As the years went by, I added the necessary features to make it suitable for creating a full video game. The engine already supports many state of the art features that are seen on modern commercial game engines like high quality rendering and special effects, physics, character animation, audio, in-game editing and many others.

The engine is also accompanied by the necessary artistic pipeline needed for developing videogames which consists in a set of plugins that I developed for the 3ds Max editor to allow exporting 3D objects and characters to the engine.

In 2009 I developed my first game based on the Voltaico Engine, called Mass Combat Vector, which is the most complex game I have created so far, both in technological and artistical terms. This game uses most of the features provided by the engine, although some features had to be added specifically for it, like inverse kinematics and blurry transparencies. You can find this game in the Games & Demos section.

Features:

Rendering: Fully dynamic lighting and shadowing effects Point, Ambient, Projective and Sun lights Cascaded and Cubic Shadow Mapping High Dynamic Range Rendering
Animations: Skeletal animation for objects and characters Animation blending Inverse Kinematics
Terrain: Heightmap based system capable of rendering vast terrains (e.g. 10x10km with a 5 meter resolution) LOD system that focus the geometric detail around the player Blending of materials using a layer based system
Atmospheric effects: Realtime atmosferic scattering and day-night cicle Aerial perspective effect Dense cloud rendering using a modified version of the Relief Mapping algorithm for light scattering simulation
Physics: Physics support using the Physx library GPU accelerated particle systems Pysics applied to skeletal animated objects (ragdolls)
Audio: Spatial audio using OpenAL EAX support for generating environmental effects Audio stored and read in the Ogg/Vorbis format Streaming from audio resources
Editor: Completely "In-Game" and capable of performing changes in the scene on-the-fly Brush-like interface that allows to deform the terrain and paint it with materials Entity editor that allows to place entities and edit their parameters Editing of time-of-day and atmosferic conditions
Artistic pipeline: 3ds Max plugin for defining the physical properties of objects and characters 3ds Max exporter for static objects and skeletal animated objects, including their physical properties information

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