Photon 3D Engine

The Photon 3D Engine was the project that concluded my BSc. studies at the HTS in the form of a graduation project at Euro-Partners Informatici (which would soon after transition into Gamegate.com). For almost a year I worked at their 'New Media' division to do some preliminary research and prototyping of a 3D real-time rendering engine for the Java platform (which just started to gain ground in web browsers at the time).

Most of my work was based on studying technologies used in iD-Software's Quake 1. The result was a modest 'indoor' 3D engine that was written completely in Java (hardware rendering support did not exist at the time yet):

• BSP-tree compiler (Binary Space Partitioning trees are very effective data structures for hidden surface removal on large static data sets).
• Convex polygon rasterizer (using scan-conversion, Z-buffer and 'Painter's Algorithm' for visible surface determination).
• Texture mapping (using 'affine' approximation techniques).

Many of the basic techniques used in the engine were described in Michael Abrash's 'Zen of Graphics Programming' and Chris Hecker's excellent 'Perspective Texture Mapping series' from Game Developer Magazine. Unfortunately the engine never got out of the prototype state due to severe time restrictions. It did however demonstrate that Java was potentially fast enough for running full 3D games (the first Just-In-Time Java compilers had just started to emerge, which greatly helped).

I graduated with highest honours and even won the 'Hogeschool Rotterdam Stifobor Studenten Prijs 2000' a year later for 'best overall graduation project'. This encouraged me to go for a masters degree at the Technical University Delft, which sadly meant that the project never went beyond the prototype phase. As a result, the engine is only a 'half-complete' Quake engine because it lacked support for adequate lighting models and had no physics/collision framework yet.

Note: enable your JIT (Just In Time) compiler for Java in your browser to obtain maximum execution speeds. Some of the demos might take a while to initialize because they were rough prototypes and need further optimizations.