Labrats technology

The LabRats engine might seem
like your standard 3d engine.

However this engine was specifically
built for platform games and heavy
repetition of objects in the scene.

Several different shadermodels are
used to enhance the atmosphere
obviously allowing objectspecific
shaders and the possiblity to dynamically
switch an objects textures and shaders
ingame.

The engine performs automatic trades between
cpu,gpu and bandwith. Trying to compensate
for systems with low bandwith or cpu capacities.

The engine has support for low-end
3d graphics cards that do not support
pixelshaders and also uses different
shaders depending on if your card
supports Shadermodel 1,2 or 3 (currently the
game is aging and shadermodel 4 might not
be implemented due to lack of funding)

The default shadermodel is 1.0, allowing
us to add bumpmapped lighting,additonal
lightsources without bumpmapping
and depth of field rendering.
Shadermodels 2 and 3 add among other thing
better lighting equations and parallaxmapping.
(Multimedia pictures were taken
running the game using shadermodel 1)

Shadows are constructed using shadowvolumes
allowing full realtime dynamic lighting and
shadowing.

The engine maps are completely dynamic
allowing the movement, addition and removal
of any object in realtime including lights.

In fact the engines leveleditor is built in!
Objects are added directly into the game
and their properties tweaked directly using
the built in scriptlanguage. Since everything
in a scene is dynamic there is no difference
between an object and animated character.
Allowing us too hook in AI behaviour and
statemachines into any static objects
or animations we want to.

The animation system uses animationblending
instead of the usual inverse kinematics.
Allowing us to blend up 10 different animations
provided by our artists allowing the engine
to control the rendering and let the artists
do what they do best.

All basic objects are constructed using
MilkShape3d combined with special inhouse
tools.

Collisiondetection is based on boundingboxes.
We do not use a general physics simulator,
since the behaviour in our game universe
currently has no use of these.
Enemy AI handles physics allowing each character
complete control of their reactions to different
objects and actions.
The main character uses a similar system, however
objects don't only handle their own reactions but
also the maincharacters, simplifying things
even more.

The soundsystem can playback OGG or raw soundfiles
in 3d for both the music and soundeffects.
To minimize memoryusage, sound is loaded on demand
or when required.

Clearly the labrats game engine focuses on
resuseability, not only of its code modules
but also of it's resources allowing
vast levelsizes without currently using any
compression techniques.

Stay tuned for coming updates about the LabRats
Game Engine.