Welcome to the Brainstem Engine Development Site..

Brainstem is a game engine currently under development that attempts to provide a simple and powerful interface with which to develop games for the Windows platform. This microsite contains a detailed overview of the project as well as downloads, media and source code.

Have a look around and don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions, comments or requests.

The Brainstem Engine is essentially a low-level application extension and set of libraries that allows anybody with game and graphics programming skills to create a computer game for Windows XP or later.

Written in C++ and powered by Direct3D9, Brainstem features a fully memory-managed kernel that handles the system tasks and allows the developer to set the display and presentation parameters for their Brainstem application.

As well as hosting the Direct3D renderer, the kernel also contains a powerful abstraction layer between the application and graphics device known as the Scene Director. The Director contains all the objects and properties of the scene to be rendered in the game. Developers can create, remove and edit the attributes of nodes within multiple scenes (such as terrain, or an imported mesh) as well as define how and when each scene should be rendered.

The rendering process features a complex shader post-processing engine that allows scenes to be drawn to a surface known as a Display. Multiple HLSL effects can be applied to this surface and the physical properties can be modified in order to provide a flexible way of handling multiple viewports. This in-game screenshot shows this system in more detail; here two displays can be seen rendering the same scene from different cameras. They have been orientated in 3D space and altered with effects (in this example, the bottom-right display has been embossed and filtered blue).

Use the link below to download an alpha build of the engine and a test game known as the 'Sandbox'. Please make sure you read the readme file first for instructions and requirements! There is a short video below that showcases a few features of the engine as it stands..





There are also a number of on-going development screenshots available that show the engine in action..

http://343gs.com/files/brainstem