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Silent Hunter II: News: Change to Viskit
By: Len 'Viking1' Hjalmarson Date: 1999-06-23 We received a tip this morning that Aeon Entertainment has switched from the NetImmerse engine to Viskit for their new Silent Hunter II simulation. We contacted Paradigm Entertainment and confirmed that this is indeed the case. Viskit is a real-time scene graph rendering engine for the Windows operating system. It uses accelerated OpenGL or Direct3D hardware to achive amazing performance. It includes loaders for OpenFlight and 3DS. It also includes a particle system, ray-cast intersections, culling, multi-texturing, level of detail switching, and more. Viskit is used by many game developers and simulation companies for both the run-time and offline tools. Vampire Viskit is a new 3D API for creating real-time audio / visual applications for Windows. It is written in C++ and assembler, and includes over 120 classes. Layered on OpenGL and DirectSound, VisKit provides the developer with a complete scene graph system that includes multiple cameras, multiple scenes, independent listeners, intersection testing, view volume culling, particle systems, extensible behaviors and more. It is completely extensible, and can be used directly with MFC, OpenGL and DirectSound. Viskit 57 48K poly 57 Chev Feature List * Audio and Visual nodes in the same scene graph * Automatic view frustum culling of objects in the graph and subtrees * Intersection testing (rays, line segments, and simple volumes) * Multiple camera support * Automatic level of detail selection * Particle systems and particle sets * Support for behaviors in the scene graph * Billboards (objects rotated to face viewer) * Hierarchical state (appearance, rendering control, etc.) * Automatic state management * Automated scene graph optimization * Texture and image import in several formats (PXC, PNG, BMP, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, RGBA, RGB, I, I * A) * Image alpha plane merging for creating alpha maps on the fly. * Automatic mip-map generation * Texture sequences * Positional audio emitters * Support for doppler, pan, and audio volume per emitter * Automatic priority culling of sounds * Support for simple volumes (box, sphere, plane, frustrum) * Extensive vector and matrix support * Import 3DS and OpenFlight databases * Geometry creation support * Vector text * Texture based text derived from True-Type fonts * Read and write the scene graph directly to a disk file * Automatic meshing of triangle primitives * Support for points, lines, triangles, quads, polygons, and meshes * Hi-speed unrolled rendering loops * Indexed and non-indexed primitive attributes * Plug-in support * Layered on OpenGL or Direct3D * Support for multi-threading and multi-processing * Available for Windows95/98 and NT Look for Silent Hunter II in early fall. Main Page |