Technology

Inland Studios uses an internally developed engine as a complete game development framework for OpenGL-equipped PC's. Our engine provides a vast array of modern technologies, and our tools chain has been integrated into Autodesk Maya, supporting everything from geometry and animation exporters to map creation and more.

The unified rendering pipeline allows for a relatively small codebase to produce amazing results.

Support for many modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapped, light attenuation functions and animated projective textures.

Dynamic stencil buffered shadow volumes supporting fully dynamic, moving light sources casting accurate shadows on all objects in the scene.

Powerful material system, enabling artists and scripters to create complex real-time shaders.

Volumetric environmental effects including height fog and distance fog.

Bloom effects used to emulate HDR at real-time frame rates on modest video cards.

Visible Surface Determination system supports high-performance, seamlessly-interconnected indoor and outdoor scenes, providing designers with tools such as recursive run-time area portals for agressive deep culling.

Full support for OpenGL 1.5/2.0 class video cards (including ATI® RADEON™- and NVIDIA® GeForce™-class cards).

Post-process render pass for per-pixel screen manipulation effects such as heat hazing.

Frame Buffer Objects are used for mirror and portal rendering as well as rendering remote views to a surface.

Animations are stored in a moderately compressed format; exporting only the joint components that changed during the life of the animation. Constraining joints in Maya will actually result in smaller animation files. This means that animations with dozens of bones may only export a single float per frame if the object was, say, only translating on a single axis.

Supports up to 4 bone influences per vertex and up to 256 bones per character, with no fixed limits on polygon counts.

Hierarchical skeletal animated, smooth-skinned geometry support for animated characters and complex animated geometry in game environments.

Multiple channels of animation, each with a variable blending factor and starting bone, allows for multiple animations to be played simultaneously.

Skeletal Keyframe interpolation support for perfectly fluid animation independent of frame rate.

Supports dynamic lighting on all geometry types with per-pixel attenuated lighting and projective texturing.

Environment lights generate pre-computed shadow volumes on export, which are then used as long as the light source does not move. The light is, however, free to modify it's lighting function dynamically at no additional cost.

Supports volume point lights and volume spot lights.

Directional volume lights are used for optimized sun lighting and shadows.

Projected textures allow the simulation of complex dynamic lighting and shadowing effects on all surfaces, including player shadows and flashlights.

Creates numerous light effects for any light in the scene by simply applying a material to the light. The material contains a scripted lookup table of intensities; useful for creating effects such as a broken/fading bulb.

The material system allows for alpha-blending and modulation of multiple layers of textures with artist-controlled blending and panning operations.

Easy-to-use mechanism for scrolling, rotating, and scaling textures via artist artist-friendly expressions. This feature can be used in a static or dynamic fashion for elaborate animated texture effects.

All textures support full levels of mip-mapping, including mipping down to a solid color.

Texture animation sequences in conjunction with projected lights allow for complex caustics.

Textures can be reduced at load-time for lower end video cards.

Our engine supplies a myriad scripts and plug-ins for Maya; these scripts are used to help export data and fix floating-point issues during the asset's transition into the game.

Maya Export Tools - We use plug-ins for Maya to bring models into our engine with mesh data, material names, skeleton structure, and skeletal animation data.