General information

The AllegRT project's aim is to provide realtime ray tracing for use with games. For rendering it uses parametric geometry, being extensible to support any mathematical geometry. Raytracing was chosen because it's a popular rendering technique (although rarely used in games) and produces excelent results. It's disadvantage is performance loss. It has to do very expensive calculations for rendering. But there are lots of demos on the internet that show it can be done in realtime (runs smoothly) and computers tend to get faster and faster. For the end programmer it will be just like a 3D engine.

Reason for development

As stated earlier, ray tracing is rarely used in games. There are some 3D engines that use a variation or just a fake implementation of ray tracing, and those that use real ray tracing most aren't free. For that we want to create a real ray tracing engine under open source license. Not only that, it's planned for AllegRT to be easly extended to adapt to the user's needs.

Support for polygons

Although there is no plans for direct polygon rendering, a fusion between the Image primitive and Allegro's polygon drawing routines on the alpha texture can generate polygons.

More information...

More information and features can be found at the Technical page. If you have any questions, requests and/or feedback in general post a message on the help forum.