High Dynamic Range

 

The major difference between S2 ENGINE HD and its predecessors is the use of Hight Dynamic Range , a technique that, compared to traditional methods, allows you to obtain very brighter scenes and more details visible in the darkness.

In this way, when the scene is very dark the brightness is increased, vice versa when the scene is very bright exposure is lowered and consequently the brightness of the scene itself, it behaves just like the human eye when coming out of tunnels! return to features

 

 

 

Dynamic Hidden Surface Removal

 

In previous versions of S2 ENGINE and in many commercial engine still today, developers use hybrid techniques which include, in most cases, BSP and portals, to eliminate not visible areas, and thus reduce unnecessary calculations.

This fact severely restricts the freedom of artists which must follow some rules to make the scene compatible with the structure "room, portal, room". It also slows down their work forcing them putting into the scene "fictitious" elements such as portals, or waiting the "building" of the BSP file before testing the scene.

In S2 ENGINE HD all these limitations do not exist any more!

The artist, now, can do whatever he wants without having to worry about portals, sectors, rooms, and more. S2 ENGINE HD will take care, in a transparent and dynamic manner, to eliminate from the rendering scene not visible elements, using the technique of occlusion query .

return to features

 

Deferred Shading

 

In the new incarnation of S2 ENGINE deferred shading technique is a must. This technique not only optimizes the rendering of more lights at the same time but it lets using a cascade of advanced shaders

such as volumetric fog, atmospheric scattering, rendering of surfaces with multiple materials and masks, rendering realistic water, the screen space ambient occlusion , and so on ...return to features

 

Terrain Rendering

 

In this new production terrain rendering has become a strength!

Now it is possible to change the terrain in real time!! you can "paint" mountains, textures like grass, rocks, you can "paint" vegetation such as trees and plants, you can pave streets and so on...

 

In the next-generation games a great importance to the batching of geometric primitives is given.

This technique reduces the number of calls to the graphics driver for drawing complex scenes with many objects. S2 ENGINE HD use the batching in a very clever way in conjunction with the hardware instancing.

In order to further improve the performance S2 ENGINE HD allows you to set up 4 LOD (levels of detail) for each object plus an "impostor" level. Impostors are very useful for distant objects. When objects are far away are gradually replaced with billboards and this allows the engine to render many of them very quickly in a single draw-call.

 

This, together with deferred shading and occlusion query , allows the engine to draw terrains with a large number and variety of objects on screen by minimizing calls to graphics driver and the number of primitive setup.

return to features

 

New Material Shading

 

The surface rendering was renewed with the production of high quality shaders.

Every object in S2 ENGINE HD has one or more surfaces, each surface has a material which can contain up to 4 different layers that are blended together by a mask texture, a bit like it happens with the photoshop levels.

Each level consists of a texturemap and a normalmap. The mapping coordinates of each of the two map can be independently tiled.

 

Each level can be configured independently by setting parameters such as strength and hardness of phong reflection and Fresnel reflection of light, color, etc. ..

This system allows you to combine multiple textures in different ways and always get such a great variety of parts with low memory consumption (as you can recombine the same textures and always get different results).

But the best is yet to come: yes, because the new development tools let you to paint a material layer directly on the obejct!!!!!

Simply select the surface of the object and select the tools for material editing. Of course, you can change all selected material parameters in Real-time .

return to features

 

Shadow Mapping

 

The human brain is able to distinguish the position of an object in the three-dimensional space due to the fact that it casts shadows on other objects.

Consequently drawing detailed shadows objects cast on other objects in the scene gives a higher degree of realism.

This is what S2 ENGINE HD does.

 

The rendering of lights and shadows has always been the strength of this production, but with the new S2 ENGINE we have reached peaks of realism difficult to replicate.

 

Thanks to a clever use of the cascade shadow mapping technique every object can cast shadows caused by sunlight without losing detail.

Other types of light such as spot and omni cast shadows: You can set the resolution of the shadows by the distance from the observer, speeding up the rendering.

return to features

 

 

Atmosphere Scattering

 

In real world, the sky takes on different colors with shades ranging from deep blue to pale yellow to red during sunrise or sunset, basing on time of day and thus the position of the sun. As we turn eyes far away, objects take on color more uniform and close to the color of the sky (blue or red or purple depending on the time).

 

These colors are due to the fact that atmosphere is composed of many tiny particles that, depending on their size, which also depends on their distance from the center of the earth, reflect and absorb sunlight in different ways.

 

This natural phenomenon is called Atmosphere scattering.

 

S2 ENGINE HD simulates this effect basing on several factors such as time of day, latitidine, air density, etc. ...

the result is truly impressive and give unparalleled realism to the scene at a cost, especially for the central processor, near zero thanks to powerful shaders.

 

At any time, in one day and one night, you can set, in real time , the color of the sky and the atmosphere, the density of clouds and fog, the weather and so on ... recording them in a timeline so that the system may interpolate their values in order to obtain a complete day-night cycle.

 

Using the scripting language it is also possible to set the time of the day, advancing the time or stopping it, for example in relation to entry into a specific area of the game.

 

return to features

 

 

 

Post-Processing FX

 

Thanks to the use of deferred shading and rendering buffers S2 ENGINE HD perfoms a set of cascading post-processing effects, which add superior realism and "movie" impact to the scene: