Iluminate games

VATAN ENGINE

The Vatan engine is a powerful and high-performance 3D OpenGL Game engine for rendering, sound and physics.

On the contrary of many other development suites that can be found on the internet that advertise feature X, or feature Y, we are providing a complete Game Demo powered by the Engine. The demo is completely playable, and shows many of the things that can be achieved with the Engine.

The engine comes with two different templates, one for a FPS game and another one for a RPG kind of game. Objects can be stored in the inventory, picked up and dropped like in any RPG game, with the particularity that every object that's picked up in the templates, has physical properties, which means they can be moved around and interacted with.

Some of the Features include:

Built IN-Editor, which allows anyone to build a high quality level, as long as the content is available. Trees, rocks, buildings, grass, particles, anything can be placed around in the map; the terrain is deformable in real time, textures can be painted into it, physical objects can be manipulated in the editor. The game scripts can be tested immediately. With the press of a key, it's possible to swap between the Editor and the game itself.
Scripting - The scripting language used in Vatan, is LUA. Trough scripts, it's possible to access the core functions of the AI (if the developer is not happy with the ones provided) and have dialog trees, control doors, control the AI, and basically control the game flow by interfacing the game logic with the trigger system.
Physics - Physics is fully integrated in the engine (via Newton Game Dynamics). Vehicles, Water Buoyancy, Character Controller, Friction, Joints, etc. Each physic object in the game has its own weight and material system associated with it. A physic object made of wood will have the wood material assigned to it, and this wood material will have friction, hitting and other sounds. The setup is all done entirely trough scripting.
GUI - a powerful GUI system is included with the engine. To see what it can do, just try out the demo, see how objects can be dragged and dropped between the player's inventory and the enemy corpses.
Lighting - Per-Vertex, Per-Pixel, Normal Mapping, Environment Mapping, Specular lightning. Bloom, Glow. Dynamic Shadows everywhere: if you can see it, then it can cast a shadow. Every single leaf in a jungle can cast a shadow, it's all up to the designer.
Meshes, A level in Vatan is made of several meshes. This is divisable into several categories:
Static Meshes than can be Vatan internal format (mesh) or Cal3d Meshes.
Animated Meshes that are Cal3d Meshes. Cal3d Meshes support vertex weightning and animation blending.

Each mesh obviously supports LOD meshes, up to 3 levels and a Impostor level(billboard) for the 3rd LOD level (static meshe only)

Every mesh in the game can be bumpmapped, reflected, refracted, set for casting a shadow or receiving a shadow (depends on what the designer chooses in the Level Editor ).

.FY files - Fy Files are built in applications like GTK Radiant, compiled into a BSP tree with Static Lightmaps included and later converted to the .FY format.. Fy Files, just like Meshes, can have up to 3 LOD's, and can also cast or receive shadows and be bumpmapped. Glass that refracts the scenery can also be done in FY Files.

Animation is provided by the Cal3D library. Cal3D is a Skeletal Based animation setup with seamless blending of multiple animation tracks. Exporters are available for Milkshape, Blender, Maya and Max.

Terrain - The terrain is built after a Heightmap image. The terrain can be painted, and manipulated inside our Game Editor, but can also be edited on any other software. Up to 4 different layers are provided trough alpha blending.

Texturing - Texture Compression is provided automatically. Texture Manager, Texture Material system that provides a System to allow texture animation, rotation, scaling,etc. (Render to Texture Effects, Bloom, Blur, Night Vision, Reflection, Refraction)

Particles can be created in PEdit (Particle engine Creator), and loaded later in game. Particles can be later loaded in game trough the Level Editor, or assigned to particular situations trough scripting.

Sky can either use the default sky system from Vatan that uses skydomes, or a complete dynamic sky system from sundog software (SilverLining). This system allows to create any type of sky just by tweaking many diferent parameters, like turbidity, haze, longitude, latitude, time, etc, all with dynamic clouds that move in the wind. For more information about SilverLining, head on to www.sundog-soft.com

AI - The AI system provided in the engine is made out of AI template scripts. This means that the developer assigns an AI script to an enemy, when placing him on the map, and he will perform whatever is in the script. New AI scripts can be written, and even a new AI can be written. The AI system currently includes:

Navigation trough an A* algorithm.
Enemies are aware of sounds, and they communicate with each other. If for example there are 3 enemies close to each other, when one of them detects the player, all of them will react and join what we call a "combat group". They will perform "intelligent" actions: if one of them isn't unable to see the player (occluded by a tree), and any of the other two have a line of sight to the player, then it can be heard enemy1 asking "where is he?" , and later an answer of one of the other two: "Behind that tree!". Vocals of all enemies can be defined in scripting, as which weapon they carry. When enemies die, they drop their weapons (once again, a real physical weapon), which the player can pick up.
Enemies respond to sound: the player can throw a rock and the enemy will go check what that sound was. Enemies have "vocal" conversations, depending if they are solo or in a group, conversations that can be setup trough scripting.
The player can chat with either Friends of Enemies, trough scripting with a Dialog System.

Below, some screenshots of the Editor and Engine, both in First Player Camera, and Third Player Camera Setup.