The Pyrogenesis Engine/Introduction

Pyrogenesis is an open source game engine developed for the real-time strategy game 0 A.D. by Wildfire Games. Wildfire Games originated as a mod developer, releasing the mod Rome at War for Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings in 2001. The same year, development commenced on their next title, 0 A.D. Originally envisioned as a comprehensive total conversion mod of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, the team eventually decided to instead develop their own engine for the project - the Pyrogenesis engine. True to its roots, the engine was designed from the ground up to be easily moddable and in 2008 the team finally decided to release the whole project, including the Pyrogenesis engine, as open source.

Features

Core

• Pathfinder.
• Support for saving and loading games.

Vale of Tempe. Screenshot from 0 A.D.

Graphics

• OpenGL-based rendering engine with support for both ARB and GLSL shaders.
• Realistic shadows with shadow mapping and shadow filtering (PCF).
• Materials system for both models and terrain.
• Normal, parallax, specular and emissive mapping.
• Ambient occlusion.
• HDR rendering and bloom.
• Animated water plane with refraction and reflection.
• Hierarchal skeletal animation and deformation system based on COLLADA.
• Particle effects.
• Triplanar texture mapping.
• Environmental lighting effects (time of day, sunset).
• Flexible terrain renderer using alpha maps to seamlessly blend terrain.

Audio

• OpenAL-based sound manager.

Platforms

Supported languages

C++ and JavaScript.

Supported operating systems

Windows, OS X and Linux.

License

GPL.

Where to get it?

The Pyrogenesis engine is not yet packaged separately, but all the source code for 0 A.D. can be downloaded from: svn.wildfiregames.com or github.com/0ad.