A New Way to Render Games

Rasterization is the most widely used method for rendering games. It originated in the days of VGA cards to take advantage of the hardware blitting of 2D images. Assembly code was used on the CPU to cull and transform triangles in 3D space, then project (flatten) triangles to 2D so hardware blitting could be used. Lighting and shadows had to be done after 2D projection, which was complicated. GPU pipelines still use the rasterization model.

Because lighting and shadows are challenging with rasterization, many game engines use shaders to integrate ray tracing for lighting. If an engine handles all lighting with ray tracing shaders, it's called 'full ray tracing'. But the core rendering pipeline remains rasterization based.

Rayve just abandons rasterization entirely. All graphics are rendered through a small Raylogic developed ray tracing core. There is no vertex/pixel processing or 2D projection. Rays are bounced directly off scene objects where they sit onto the display. PBR materials, lighting, shadows and reflections happen as a natural part of the ray tracing process. Even user interface elements are ray traced. For Rayve, this is full ray tracing!.

Dark Ore

So as they say (or maybe no one ever said), a game engine is not a game engine until a game is made with it. Dark Ore is that game. The source code will be available to licensees as an example of writing a game in Rayve.

Dark Ore is a mini space game where you build a space station, set up ore intake and processing, deliver products, battle pirates in your spaceship and *hopefully* make money. The game uses programmer art (apologies).

During development, incremental builds will be posted here. Just unzip to a folder and click on the Dark Ore icon.

Experience fully ray traced game as it develops!