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.
These non-Euclidean portals can seamlessly connect any locations in a map or even merge different maps with an arbitrary (possibly randomized) layout. They have been supported for a while, but only recently I began coding the ability to walk through such portals. This is done without actual translation, rotation or scaling of map parts; it's the space itself that gets warped in such a way allowing light and bodies to pass through alternative ways like in a wormhole.
Extensive use of such "impossible" spaces could allow for creating really intricate levels for puzzle or shooting games, and ability to merge different maps may enhance replayability by putting maps together procedurally from prefabricated "modules".
Great stuff! Non-Euclidean portals give a mapper really awesome options in so many ways.
Leon
On the other hand, they will pose a challenge to pathfinding algorithms and physics. Even sound effects have to take the topology of space into account to propagate correctly; the same is true for calculating a distance between two points.