Reticon entertainment new 3d engine

[chao2]

Have you guys heard about Reticon's new 3d engine for dreamcast and other platforms. It has been in development for a long time now,and it will be used in their new game called Tahi Arocean War. Here is a summary of their engine from their site

[chao2]

The IONICON Engine - originally called the ION engine, is a lightweight, cross-platform render and physics engine focused on CPU and memory optimization.

The IONICON Engine was originally created with a specific need. As the Tahi project grew, it required a system of organization and optimization for its source code that was uniform throughout and the discussions for the first engine for Reticon began.

In 2010 the Ionicon Engine was titled the 'ION Engine' due to its project goal of having an almost 'atomically' small memory and CPU footprint and its unique ability to swap resources in and out of memory like that of a positively or negatively charged ion on a given atom.

In 2011-2012, a research team was assembled to further the research on the now titled IONICON engine. During this time a rendering, sound, input & controls and physics pipeline were assembled for the engine's structure and each researcher was assigned a specific pipeline and the necessary Dreamcast source code and assembly libraries.

In 2013 the IONICON engine was introduced to high definition texturing with a specific set of rendering functions titeled the 'PALIVENA' functions while still maintaining no loss in rendering output speed (60fps) with textuers in excess of 1024x1024 resolutions.

Currently the engine is still in developement as it increases its ability to render sequences taken in by Xbox kinnect functionality as well as further optimization, VMU reading and always ensuring that the IONICON engine is as cross-platform as possible.



The main challenges for this project include:
Maintaining a small RAM & CPU footprint
Memory management
Assuring that the engine is cross-platform by the introduction of wrapper classes

With the engine's introduction with the Dreamcast, the engine's scope was never to exceed 16MB for RAM and 200MHz for CPU overhead. With requirements this small, a memory management technique was put into place to swap data in and out of the 16MB internal memory of the Dreamcast. During this time the technique of, "If we can hide it, we can swap it" was introduced into the code of the IONICON engine.

Testing for the IONICON engine's capability and functionality has been proven to be difficult on the Dreamcast, since there is no direct source to monitor CPU and RAM consumption, debugging options had to be programmed into the engine to test RAM consumption as well as CPU utilization. Other errors such as memory leaks were much harder to locate without the use of a console that outputted meaningful data for the engine.

During this time a console was developed for the engine to help assist the team procure any data needed for debugging and help narrow down any serious bugs that would not otherwise be easily detectable by code traversal.

The other major challenge is that the engine must be as cross-platform to all major platforms as possible. When the project first began, the presence of Android and iOS platforms was completely minimal in the market and at the time, the engine did not focus on the given platforms and therefore did not have the capability to be used on them effectively. However, as of recent, the engine has been updated to utilize such platforms. This paradigm leaves the engine in a constant state of evolution as newer forms of media enter the market and find their way into gaming and other various forms of entertainment.

The IONICON engine implements the use of wrapper classes to help assist with its ability to be as cross-platform as possible, by leaving the lower level classes and functions out of reach to the developer.

[chao2]

Even though im not a programmer I would still like to progammers thoughts and opinions on this engine. Are you guys suprised at all? I know am because this may be the first 3d indie game engine for dreamcast. what are your thoughts?

here is the link to Reticon's facebook and website
http://www.reticonentertainment.org/
https://www.facebook.com/RETINOMICON

[cube_b3]

We have already posted about the engine and I am not interested in any news from Reticon until unless I see them release a game.

[|darc|]

Well that's pretty harsh...

[cube_b3]

Do we see Senile Team consistently giving inconsequential updates about Age of the Beast?
Did we hear from Duranik before between 97 - 2010 about Sturmwind?
Additionally we also have Scourge and Dynamite Dreams.

All games have actually been seen running on a Dreamcast and the companies have a good track record of making games, that people have had a chance to play. Then we have Reticon, who consistently want coverage and don't even have anything more than concept art and text to show for it.

I am not trying to be rude, I would just like them to be quiet until they are ready to either open pre-orders or show us something worth getting excited over.

Maybe after playing DNF vaporware just pisses me off.

[RyoDC]

I'm too lame to read all the thread posts, but... they released the sources of engine or editor for it?

I think 3d development kinda abandoned for all those years for Dreamcast...

[PH3NOM]

Even though im not a programmer I would still like to progammers thoughts and opinions on this engine. Are you guys suprised at all? I know am because this may be the first 3d indie game engine for dreamcast. what are your thoughts?

here is the link to Reticon's facebook and website
http://www.reticonentertainment.org/
https://www.facebook.com/RETINOMICON

It is hard to be excited about this update. Problem is, they announced this back when?
If they had some content to show at this point, I may be a little more interested.
But that it has taken an entire team 3 years to produce that screenshot seems less than impressive.
I am just afraid that this may be too ambitious and that they may be bighting off more than they can chew, so to speak.

Also, some of the claims for the 'engine' seem a little misleading.
For example, the PVR has a limit for texture sizes at 1024x1024, so the claim to have high definition textures above that seems like a joke. Also there is only ~4mb VRAM for textures to work with on the DC, so you can store only 4 textures per frame at that size.

I'm too lame to read all the thread posts, but... they released the sources of engine or editor for it?

I think 3d development kinda abandoned for all those years for Dreamcast...

I dont think 3d development is abandonded on the DC, in fact, I think we may be on the verge of seeing some interesting things...

Here is a video I captured a month or so back of my current build of OpenGL for the Dreamcast:

[Indiket]

I completely agree with PH3NOM, there's something lurking in 3D homebrew and sure will have a great DC boost
This new OpenGL implementation is what noob devs like me need!