Independent developer Tony Macaroni has unveiled a custom game engine built over an eight-month period. The engine focuses on rendering high-detail environments, with a forest and meadow demo achieving an average of 130 FPS on an RTX 3080 graphics card at 1440p resolution.
The engine utilizes clustered hierarchical levels of detail for virtual geometry and voxel-based rendering for distant objects. Global illumination is handled through a hybrid approach combining screen space and voxel techniques, intentionally avoiding ray tracing. The developer also modified meshoptimizer to support simultaneous generation of hierarchical details and voxels.
Performance metrics vary by scene: the demo hits 200 FPS from a top-down perspective, dropping to 80 FPS in dense forest areas. On a laptop equipped with a mobile RTX 3070, the engine maintains 60 FPS in most scenarios. The developer identifies the RTX 2060 and RX 6400 as the minimum hardware requirements for the engine.
Macaroni previously experimented with global illumination and virtual textures in Godot before transitioning to a custom architecture. While the engine includes a weather system integrated since the early development stages, the creator notes that its visual realism requires further refinement.
