Galaxy Engine

Today I would like to present my latest 3D engine. The first true 3D voxel engine for Nintendo DS!



The work on this engine was quite different from my normal 3D work. Mainly because the Galaxy engine doesn’t use any polygons but voxels.

This allows for some really awesome new gameplay elements. Something you can rarely expect from a 3d engine! Basically the engine gives you full control of every voxel in the scene.

Which allows fully destructible 3D models. You can restore voxels that were destroyed, or you can add new ones on the fly!

Also, because the engine uses voxels instead of polygons. It’s now possible to add any kind of object/shape to the scene without any disadvantages regarding speed. For example in a polygon engine, a simple cube would only have 12 polygons (triangles) while that count would increase fast for a fully rounded sphere. However in a voxel engine, the voxel count for the given example wouldn’t increase that fast.

The engine also features per voxel collision detection (next to the normal object vs object detection).

Besides voxels, the engine also supports 2D sprites (for an example of that, look at the player/objects in Flipper). Also, everything rendered 100% in software mode. Which leaves the GPU free to do whatever you want!

The engine runs on both Nintendo DS and DSi.