4D Rulers has completed a new version of their AMP II 3D engine , version 1.3 of which was used to create the Secret Service Security Breach 3D action . In connection with this, a tech has now been issued. a demo of the latest version of the AMP II engine, which serves to introduce its capabilities. You can now download the demo from us, together with the SDK and other tools, which are intended especially for all mod creators and potential licensers of the AMP II engine.
COMPONENTS/FEATURES
Real-time 3D corridor renderer. The Six degrees of freedom allows the user to create full 3D environments, like first and third person shooters, 3D architectural walkthroughs, virtually any 3D simulation.
Per Pixel Lighting. The engine uses per pixel dynamic lighting, not preprocessed low resolution shade maps such as the Quake series engines or Unreal engine. This next generation lighting allows for bump mapping, specular lighting and stencil shadowing. Characters and the environments are now rendered and cast shadows the in the same pipeline, so characters, map objects and level geometry are all treated the same and are rendered in the most realistic methods possible using the latest hardware.
Bump mapping. Bump maps will give the appearance of real depth in a surface, allowing for fine detail like fingernails, wrinkles, beard stubble, rivets, weapon details, carpet, anything you can imagine under a few inches in real world depth can be simulated correctly with a bump map. Bump mapping helps eliminate texture tiling also, and time can be saved because world textures no longer need fake shadows and lighting painted into them, just color is needed in texture maps now.
Specular lighting. By using a texture, you can control exactly how shiny each pixel of a surface is. Chrome, and shiny metals have never before looked so realistic in any game engine.
Stencil Shadowing. Realistic stencil shadowing allows shadows to cast off of characters and the world itself. These shadows cast onto other surfaces and wrap around up a wall, or onto mutliple surfaces, just like real shadows work. Other engines try to fake shadows with projection blobs on characters and by using shade maps which are a big waste of texture memory. Don't settle for anything less than real time stencil shadowing in your game.
Projection Textures. By using a texture in conjunction with a light source, you can create very detailed soft shadow effects like mini blinds, or make custom shaped lights by filtering them through an image.
Fog Flares. Nearly any shape of lense flares are now possible, so volumetric lights, spot lights, rectangular glows, etc can all be created for the ultimate lens flare effects.
Texturing. AMP II allows up to 1024x1024 32 bit textures. It supports TGA, PNG, BMP, and DMT file formats.
Texture Memory Management System. The engine has texture compression and scalable texture depth to lower texture memory requirements.
Shader System. Create "shader effects" which manipulates a texture for fantastic surface effects. Panning, scaling, glowing, pulsing, rotating, flickering, animated, and other effects are all possible. These are useful for panning text or static on a computer screen, light bulbs flickering on and off, pulsing glowing surfaces like lava, practically anything you can imagine. Used in conjuntion with lighting effects can produce stunning visuals.
3D character renderer with skeletal animation system. Skeletal animation system allows for the most realistic animations possible. Use 3D Studio Max's standard animation system, Bones, Character Studio or motion capture to bring characters and animated objects to life. The engine also has a velocity setting to slow your characters' walk down to match his current speed, so you can tweak how fast a player moves without redoing run and walk animations. Also polygons can be assigned to multiple bones which gives a nice elastic appearance at the joints.
Realistic light sourcing with shadows. Every light in AMP II is dynamic, meaning there are no pre-calcuated lights. This makes it possible to destroy lights, move lights, apply shaders to lights, etc, at no extra rendering expense. Per pixel lighting allows users to control the lighting of their surfaces at a per pixel level and also allows using smoothing groups and normal maps. This allows for soft round lit surfaces, or hard edges on corners, or anywhere in between just like smoothing groups work in 3D rendering packages such as 3D Studio Max. Colored lights are allowed as well.
Particle system. An advanced particle system allows creation of sparks, smoke, dust, muzzleflashes, flamethrower effects, weapon effects, etc.
Portal Rendering. Portal rendering allows for viewing of levels almost instantly versus older BSP engines which sometimes took hours or even days of preprocessing times. It is also much easier to work with and more efficient than BSP rendering engines. Simply make a 90 degree turn in a corridor, and it perfectly cuts off what isn't visable.
OpenGL based rendering.
Includes Wire networking library which powered the ultra smooth net play for Gore �Ultimate Soldier.
System requirements:
Nvidia GeForce 3 and 4 ti. graphics accelerator*
Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, NT.
64 Megs of System memory
60 Megs of Hard drive space
Pentium III 400 Mhz or higher.
*The only video accellerators cards the demo supports right now is Nvidia GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 ti. Note: You must run the latest official Nvidia drivers, not the beta drivers. GeForce mx and ATI are not supported in this initial release. We will support those cards in the next release.
