Vision Engine (commercial)

[Tami]

[url=\"http://www.trinigy.net/index.php?id=36\"]The Vision Engine[/url] is one of the industry´s most advanced technologies for professional game development and has proven its versatility and reliability in more than 70 commercial game productions all over the world.

Powerful and Flexible Technology
Rather than being targeted at a single game project or even a specific genre, Vision is the development system of choice for virtually any kind of 3D title. Like no other technology on the market, it provides a comprehensive tools set and an impressive list of out-of-the-box features while at the same time being easily accessible and customizable. Additionally, Vision neatly fits into existing production pipelines, flexibly adapting to your company´s requirements.

Smooth Workflow
Vision has been designed to reduce the limits imposed on your design, art and programming departments by combining cutting-edge technology with a smooth WYSIWYG workflow. vForge, a fully pluggable, extensible and customizable scene editor, makes creating interactive worlds easier than ever. Plugins for 3D Studio MAX and Maya allow the creative minds in your team to work with their tools of choice, thus increasing productivity and ensuring optimal quality of game content and art assets.

Competent, quick Support and Continuous Updates
Licensees of the Vision development package not only get a cutting-edge game engine technology, but also a reliable technology partner who provides immediate, competent support as well as regular updates, major new features and new SDK components. Thus, you can focus on your game project from the first day on while Trinigy makes sure that the technology behind it remains cutting-edge.

The Vision Engine Runtime is a powerful and versatile multi-platform technology ideally suited for all types of games and capable of rendering extremely complex scenes at smooth frame rates. It provides a well-designed, clean and object-oriented C++ API and includes a wide variety of features, ranging from rendering and animation over visibility determination and basic physics to multithreading and resource management.

Large, fully customizable Feature Set
The Vision Engine has been designed with customizability in mind - you can easily create your own rendering pipeline, integrate the physics system of your choice, or write your own animation code. Additionally, Vision provides a large set of convenient high-level and low-level helper classes which make customization as easy as possible.

At the same time, an extensive set of out-of-the-box features reduces the development time and cost of your project. Lights and Shadows, Radiosity, Animations, Normal Maps, Particles, Postprocessing and much more - all these features are right at your fingertips once you have installed the Vision SDK.

Rendering
Vision's rendering core has been engineered for maximum performance and stability, allowing highly detailed, realistic scenes to be rendered with maximum visual fidelity. It supports practically every state of the art feature and is designed to flexibly adapt to the requirements of your specific project.

The default rendering pipeline - shipped with complete source code - serves as an ideal starting point for your game project, providing an extensive set of fully integrated features like

* Normal Maps, Specular Color and Specular Exponent Maps, Virtual Displacement Maps
* Radiosity-based, normal-mapped illumination with light grid and light maps
* Dynamic illumination with advanced dynamic shadowing techniques, configurable attenuation, projected lights, and much more
* Powerful multi-threaded Particle Engine
* Overlay and GUI rendering
* HDR and Postprocessing

Vision uses a combination of efficient visibility culling techniques - including hardware occlusion query, portals, and quadtrees/octrees - to achieve consistently high frame rates.

Other components
The SDK ships with modules that extend the core engine's feature set. These modules can be customized and extended. Examples:

* Physics bindings, i.e. Vision's own physics system can easily be replaced by 3rd party physics using the engine's physics interface
* other 3rd party middleware bindings such as Kynapse AI or IDV Speedtree
* Particle and cloth simulation including customizable constraint types
* camera cinematic playback

Animation
Vision's powerful animation system provides support for many of the animation methods of 3D Studio MAX and Maya. Optimised quaternion-based skeletal animations, morphing deformers, and vertex animations provide the basis for smooth, lifelike character animations. Skeletons and animation setups can be shared across meshes in order to save memory; sharing of animation results across entities allows for high-performance mass scenes with little CPU impact.

The concept of fully configurable animation trees makes dynamic layering and blending of arbitrary animations extremely easy. Following the philosophy of customizability, Vision additionally allows you to define your own vertex and bone modifiers, resulting in an extremely flexible animation setup.

Depending on the requirements of your game, skinning can either be performed on the CPU or the GPU, with many platform-specific optimisations ensuring optimal performance characteristics.

Performance and Optimisation
Vision has been engineered to provide exceptionally high performance with a small memory footprint on all supported hardware platforms. A hand-tuned system of platform-specific optimisations ensures that the potential of both modern PCs and game consoles is used to its fullest extent. Among the features accounting for Vision's high performance are, for instance:

* Batching of primitives and elimination of redundant state changes
* Scalable effects and Level of Detail
* Efficient visibility culling system
* CPU-specific optimisations (ISSE, 3DNow!, AltiVec)
* GPU-specific optimisations (Memory Export, Vertex Fetch, Instancing, etc.)
* Multi-Thread architecture.

Vision's Thread Manager allows easy distribution of CPU-intensive tasks across multiple CPUs or hardware threads with very little overhead, thus taking full advantage of modern multi-core processors. A demo application based on the Vision Engine has been chosen by Intel to demonstrate the performance benefits of computers with four and more CPU cores, yielding an almost linear performance gain.

In order to facilitate game-specific memory and performance optimisations, Vision ships with a convenient run-time profiling framework and provides a powerful resource management and analysis system. Performance bottlenecks can be easily identified and removed, and unusued resources can automatically be purged and recreated.

The Vision Engine is currently available for PC, Xbox, and Xbox360. A PLAYSTATION 3 version is currently in development and scheduled for release in Q4/2007.

The Vision Engine is perfectly suited for sophisticated Serious Games applications. It is already powering multiple projects in various simulation and visualisation environments.

Vision provides various features aimed at the Serious Games market - for instance, multi-monitor, multi-context rendering for stereoscopic projections -, making it ideal for complex visualisation, simulation and training projects in civilian and military environments.

Trinigy offers attractive licensing models specifically tailored to the differing needs of today's game development projects, including full-price A to AAA titles, Value Games and online-distributed Xbox Live Arcade productions. Vision licenses are typically provided on a per-title/per-platform basis without any royalties, and always come with support and regular technology updates.

For the Serious Games sector, Trinigy provides individual licensing terms tailored to fit the requirements of your company and your specific project.

To find out more about our licensing terms, please contact us.