Brahma is a 3D game engine with a rather retrofuturistic design, intended for small studios and solo developers. It's being written from scratch in C++ using standard Windows API and no third-party libraries. This technology introduces an entirely new class of low-latency real-time engines that make special timing requirements, treating frames as video fields with a target time budget of 2-4 ms each, down from 16-33 ms frame budgets normally seen in game engines. It evolves in a different way than other modern engines, rejecting conventional BSP, Z-buffer, floating-point coordinates, and most of the lame screen-space effects in favor of innovative and efficient techniques. The engine is non-Euclidean capable to some degree; also it supports true displacement mapping for sectors as a means to virtualize geometry that affects collisions. The engine is also carefully designed to be easy and convenient to develop for, yet versatile and adaptive to any needs.
Not long ago I was prototyping a new lens flare effect that is properly intergrated with the rasterizer. The same mechanism can also produce fullscreen glare as a palette effect that is very fast but really adds to the immersion.
In Brahma, any object bright enough automatically becomes a light source based on its texture properties and visible area, so there's no need to place them by hand in levels, just crank up luminance of anything you want.
Unlike flares seen in my LNGA mod, these are treated as true area lights that take into account the amount of occlusion by the scene, and this doesn't even require additional hitscan calls. So far this effect has some issues to solve, but looks very promising as a replacement for bloom normally done with shaders. Also this effect is essential to HDR-aware lighting and eventually will become a part of the global illumination system that can simulate decent quality soft shadows, GI and caustics without requiring costly hardware like RTX video cards.