Varium is a Joint effort between Randall Schleufer, Dan East, Planet Schoogie, and Jason Jurguine. They have been working on Varium for about 1.5 months and started from the ground up. No real optimization has been done to the rasterization engine since they have been on such a tight schedule, but they are currently achieving 17-20 FPS on the iPAQ 3650. This demo includes sound, music, physics, (simplistic)bot AI, 24-bit textures, etc.
<img src="http://www.chrisedwards.ca/~randall/varium01.jpg"><!>
Some of the engine features are a powerful scripting and configuration system, allowing absolute flexability of the engine. We are using it for Isometric view now, but the camera can also be attached to act as an FPS or Tomb Raider Style game.
Dynamic lighting is apparent on such things as weaponfire in this video. Varium will also feature vertex lighting and can place fixed lights throughout the map.
The entire engine is based on 3D- no sprites are involved, allowing us to have volumetric explosions, with transparency. In the video, the bullet currently shards the impact point. It is also possible to have alpha water textures, and bitmasked textures. Water textures are also animated.
Multiplayer is already working, although they were not able to feaure that at the summit, due to problems with our connectivity. It will be realtime multiplayer, with deathmatch and team modes.
A singleplayer game will also be available for those without connectivity.
Players can currently crouch, or move into a prone position in order to "hide".
They are still a couple months away from launch with this game. Varium is only the project name, we don't have a game name, nor engine name yet.
