GDC Demo - Chinatown

We saved the best for last. In the last blog, we showed off Sector, a few other screenshots, and the looping video that we played at our booth. But Chinatown, developed by Luma Arcade and assisted by our internal studio, raises the bar for what's doable in Torque 3D. One of the reasons is our deferred lighting system

Deferring lighting reduces the amount of work that occurs in your pixel shading hardware. And if you follow Richard Huddy of ATI ( formerly NVIDIA ), as I've done over the past ten years, then you know that any interesting GPU bound game at any reasonable resolution is likely bound by pixel work. In shader model 4.0 cards, the pixel and vertex hardware is unified. So if your game is limited by pixel performance then you are also probably going to sacrifice vertex count as well. By performing the lighting last, you only perform expensive lighting operations on pixels that will actually contribute to the final picture. The fastest pixel shader is the one that never runs.

Luma designed Chinatown to show our lighting on their great art. There are hundreds of lights scattered through out this city. Awesome!

Great news, Torque 3D is for sale. For a limited time you can buy our flagship engine by using the coupon code GDC2010