Vergence 2

Overview

Vergence 2 is the second version of the Vergence 3D Engine. It was developed as a student project at the Stuttgart Media University in Stuttgart, Germany. Development of the engine started in march of 2008 and a first demo of the engine and its tools was presented in late june of the same year.

The engine was, for the most part, written from scratch by a team of two. Only a few hundred lines of code have been re-used from the previous version of the engine, primarily because of a major change in architecture and our transition towards a multi-threaded engine core.

We consider the engine to be "work in progress" and it is still lacking many important features. We are now working on the engine in our own time and hope to one day make a small game with it.

Screenshots

Please note that these are "work in progress" shots that do not reflect the quality of the final product.

Features

Engine

Written in "modern" object-oriented C++
Highly modular architecture
Small engine-core
Written with platform-independence in mind
Ready for internationalization (uses Unicode everywhere)
Very easy to use custom unit testing framework ("vunit")
Extensive utility class library
Utilizes multi-core CPUs (using our task-based concurrency framework)
Intelligent resource management (asynchronous loading, streaming)

Renderer

DirectX 9, shader model 3 class renderer
Multi-threaded
64 bit high dynamic range rendering pipeline
Platform agnostic (Renderer operates behind a platform independent abstraction layer)

Lighting

Time of day lighting
100% realtime dynamic lighting
Deferred renderer allows for a very high number of active light sources in the scene
Per-pixel dynamic lighting (parameterized Phong shading)
Realtime (screen-space) ambient occlusion
Zero pre-processing

Materials

Highly extensible shader-based material system
Easy to use node-based material editor
Familiar material properties including diffuse, self-illumination mask, specular mask, glossiness, opacity, opacity-mask and normal
Convient support for many common material effects including: Normal mapping (including detail normal maps), Parallax mapping, Gloss mapping, Specularity mapping and Glow mapping

Effects

Highly extensible and heavily optimized effects pipeline
Automatic management of render targets
HDR bloom and glow effects
Light shafts
Color grading (sharpen, tint, contrast)
Vignetting
Backdrop system that allows for arbitrary meshes to be placed in the background (3D skyboxes)
Multi-layer sky dome with dynamically lit animated clouds.

Terrain

Heightmapped terrain
Automatic distribution of meshes (e.g. grass, shrubs) on the terrain based on distribution texture

Scene management

Extensible scene graph API
Built around a simple yet powerful custom RTTI-system
The scene graph can be queried using a powerful, SQL-like querying API
Scene graph can be serialized and deserialized
Automatic instancing
Picking support

Tools

Robust 3ds max 9 geometry exporter
Node-based material editor
What-you-see-is-what-you-get map editor

Libraries/Middleware

DirectX 9
OpenAL
wxWidgets (for the tools)