Aurora Borealis

Our very own engine

There's a lot going on in this video, it showcases some of the features of our engine.

Highlights

Particle system

A CPU-based particle system with editor which I've worked on a bit here and there.

Visual scripting

Integrated visual scripting system in our engine with custom nodes.

PhysX integration

PhysX implementation in our own engine. 

Culling - camera frustum and shadows

I implemented culling for the camera frustum as well as shadows for light sources. It is a way to avoid putting more work on the GPU than necessary, things that aren't inside the camera view aren't rendered and objects outside light range aren't drawn on the shadow depth buffer.

Summary - My contributions

I was involved in coding the lighting for the engine, it's certainly not perfect, but it works.

We've got shadows for directional, point and spot lights. There's a small issue that needs to be fixed.

I implemented render pipeline state objects in our engine which made it easier to add additional render passes and improved performance somewhat.

Isak and I integrated PhysX by working together, one very late night I actually got it working while Isak was working from home.

Our engine supports custom shaders and I've had to fix it more than once throughout it's short life. No doubt I will have to look over it in the future.

As mentioned in the highlights, I coded a CPU-based particle system with editor which turned out fairly good.

Visual scripting was coded by Isak and I and between the two of us we've added nearly all of the nodes for the system.

Debug render passes which makes it easier to understand why some textures or props don't look the way they should.

I coded frustum culling between Deliverance and Spite: The Summoning. I was very satisfied with how it turned out.

You can read more about these in the project pages!

Debug rendering textures
Particle system

Currently the particle emitter supports the following features:

  • Custom particle texture
  • Gradient color and alpha over lifetime
  • Random start and end speed between two values
  • Random start and end scale between two values
  • World and local space particles
  • Spawn shapes - Sphere, circle, box and point
  • Runtime calculated render bounds for culling
  • Toggle for looping and always simulate system
  • Random start and end direction in three axes
  • Saving and loading presets
Wishlist features

I would like to add support for mesh particles instead of just sprites, ribbon particles and curves for speed, size and direction over life. Orbit force is something that can really add a lot and is not too hard to implement. More spawn shapes, specifically cone and mesh. Rotated particles, which is in the works, but put on ice until other projects are finished. Added noise to velocity, which should also be fairly easy to add.


The features aren't listed in any particular order, but I hope to find some time to implement them all.

Culling

As I was very happy with how culling worked and how much it helped, I want to add culling for spotlights and there are plans in the final project for me to add a quad tree for easier culling.

More coming soon...