Tracy homepage

Welcome to the TRACY project home page

Introduction

TRACY is a new 3D rendering engine I'm working on. It's particularity is that its rendering primitive is not polygonal, but voxels (VOlume piXEL). 3D objects are built upon sampled 3D arrays of pixels.

Benefits of this technology

Objects have volume : unlike polygonal approach, where only the surface of the object is managed, voxel objects are true volumetric shapes.
Objects can be easily modified in realtime : due to the data structure, it becomes very easy to alter 3D objects. You can for example sculpt an object into a cubing stone, or make any hole in a shape.
Rendering speed is not based on the scene complexity, but on the rendering area size.

Concerns of this technology

Depending on the sampling used, objects can appear "blocky".
Memory consuming.

The project

TRACY is an experimental project. I'm trying to built a complete 3D engine based on voxels, suitable for interactive applications. A demo game will be based on this engine.

I'm building this engine using Borland Delphi, on a 466 MHZ PC computer with 128 Mb RAM. I consider this as a basis configuration needed to handle the engine.

Features of the engine

software renderer available (no need for 3D acceleration) : any rendering resolution is supported
OpenGL renderer version available : you can benefit from hardware acceleration using it
perspective projection
realtime rendering (focused on gaming)
16 bit color voxels
Lightmap
Animated MD2 mesh rendering support
Simple data structure, allowing realtime modification of the objects without overhead
z-buffering
Native support for alpha-blended 2D sprites

Screenshots

Here are some shots of the renderer in its actual state. In this demo, the user can make some holes & tunnels anywhere in the structure, or throw some green mud balls.

Software renderer version	Software renderer version
Software renderer version	Software renderer version
OpenGL renderer version (showing MD2 mesh)	OpenGL renderer version

Status of the project

The engine is now in its final state.

Download

Click HERE to download the full Delphi code + EXE of TRACY (OpenGL + Software, 306 K).

See also the FROOGZ Homepage to see a game using TRACY.

Contact

If you want some information about this engine, you can drop me a line at eicartNOSPAM@momorprods.com (remove NOSPAM from the e-mail). Please contact me if you find some speed improvement issues in the code too.

Project history

01-04-2003	FROOGZ version 1.0 is finally out ! This helped me to fix some Tracy small bugs. The software MD2 renderer has been rewritten and is now faster than ever. The OpenGL renderer can now texturize the voxels, and I've also fixed some rotation matrixes.
16-11-2002	I've added the following features to TRACY: - MD2 mesh rendering support. The software-version is based on Paul Toth's work (check his site here) - Native splitscreen rendering possible - OpenGL version can has now support for textured voxels (a single tecture for the whole voxel-set)
11-11-2002	Great news : the TRACY unit can now render voxels using OpenGL. The OpenGL version of this algorithm is an object-order one, and for this reason it is less impacted by the screen resolution than its software equivalent. The accuracy of the renderer can be adjusted to keep a decent framerate for big volumes: it generates a smoothed polygonset from the voxel shape in realtime. The new pascal unit handles both OpenGL & software modes, it is specified in the initialization function.
31-10-2002	I've been very busy working on FROOGZ, but here comes the source code and exe demo of Tracy for download ! Thanks to Damian Jones, Tracy now supports lightmaps and pseudo-realtime raytracing-based lighting.
02-06-2002	No news for about 1 month ! The reason is I've been working on the game that will use the TRACY ENGINE. Its name is FROOGZ, and is basicaly a 3D evolution of the game LIERO. The homepage for this game is http://www.momorprods.com/froogz. For this game, 3D sound support is made via the FMOD Sound library.
28-04-2002	Using linear interpolation, the engine becomes more than 2x faster ! I've added the z-buffered 2D sprites (with alpha-blending) + "virtual" objects (ie several pictures of a same object under several view angles).
17-04-2002	Fixed the engine to avoid gaps in small width shapes of voxels. The renderer gets more accurate.
14-04-2002	First version of the web site. The renderer is still 100% pure delphi code, and does not yet implement sprites.
06-04-2002	I had a very interesting discussion with Ken Silverman. This kind man is the author of the Duke Nukem 3D engine (!!), and is also working on a Voxel renderer : Voxlap.
xx-01-2002	First experiments with the renderer.