ECTS 2001: Codecreature engine demoed

It shouldn't be a surprise that 3D game graphics are headed toward worlds and characters of increasingly high surface detail. One reminder of this trend is Codecult's new Codecreature engine, which is optimized to use hardware vertex acceleration to render environments with extremely high polygon counts. The company demonstrated its technology at the Nvidia booth at ECTS, showing a rolling landscape covered with dense grass blowing in the wind, as well as several densely foliated trees.

The entire demo environment contained 3 million polygons, and at any given moment, there were 200,000 to 300,000 polygons on the screen at once. The engine is said to be capable of 10 million polygons per second, but it's of course limited by the state of PC hardware. Even on a top-of-the-line Athlon DDR system with a GeForce3, the scene ran at a steady 12 frames per second. Another key feature of the engine is that it handles key collision and visibility functions in real time instead of relying on pregenerated BSP trees or portals. The most demanding element in the scene was the seemingly limitless blades of grass, which were made up of blended textures applied to single polygons. These polygons are then animated to move in a varying wind by using DirectX 8 vertex shaders that run natively on a GeForce3 or Radeon 8500 graphics card.

Codecult is dedicated specifically to developing and supporting this engine and has 30 programmers working on it exclusively. In addition to licensing the engine to third-party developers, the company is sponsored by German publisher Phenomedia so that the engine can be used in the publisher's projects.

For a better sense of what this technology can produce, watch the movie linked below.