Evaluation Kit Overview

Thank you for evaluating Reality Engine. Please remember this evaluation is confidential, and may only be distributed to employees of your company.

To begin, visit http://reality.artificialstudios.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RealityBinaries to get the latest downloads.

It is vital that you have the latest drivers from nvidia.com and/or ati.com or you will almost certainly experience problems due to recently fixed bugs. If using a 6800, we highly recommend that you run these new test drivers from NVIDIA (recent) or the 71.24 drivers (old). Other driver versions will have trouble displaying the WaterSurface in FragIsleBeta. On some driver versions, 6800 cards may have problems running the FragIsleBeta scene at full texture resolution due to an outstanding driver bug. If your framerate is very poor please lower the texture quality slider appropriately.

While Reality Engine scales to older hardware, the demo scenes included were designed specifically to show off our next generation technology, and will require an appropriately equipped DirectX9 graphics card. If you need to test the engine on older hardware we recommend creating some scenes yourself with the tutorials on our developer portal.

We provide free support to accompany the evaluation, we recommend to direct queries towards our mailing list or forums, which you can subscribe to below. To subscribe and manage your list options (and view the archives) visit http://lists.artificialstudios.com/listinfo.cgi/realitydev-artificialstudios.com. To post on the list send a message to realitydev-artificialstudios.com@lists.artificialstudios.com. We also have a new forum for support queries, at http://artificialengine.com/forums using the above username and password. You may also email support@artificialstudios.com.

Technical Overview

The Reality Eval Kit, available at RealityBinaries, is an example of a basic team-deathmatch First Person Shooter written using the Reality Engine. It includes vehicles, a variety of rigid body physics including chain systems & breakable objects & ragdolls, day-night cycle & weather, expansive outdoor & indoor gameplay, reflecting-refracting water with wave dynamics, precomputed radiance transfer & real-time shadowing, all displayed with cutting edge graphics technology. Instructions for using the Eval Kit itself are available at RealityBinaries; the following covers some basic technical starting points for examining the Eval Kit's code and content to determine how to modify it, or just learn concepts from it to apply to your own game.

The actual game is written in C# Script, using the Reality API Wrapper for maximum speed. The files that are most critical to the functionality of the game are in the Scripts project -- specifically, GameCore.cs (which controls the global demo game logic), Destroyable.cs (destructable MActors in the World, such as Players and Vehicles), and Player.cs (the "avatar" that you actually control with your input, and which updates the camera accordingly). The Reality API Wrapper is contained in the ScriptingSystem project, with Wrappers.h containing most of the classes (the rigid body physics classes and MNetworkActor are contained in other files within that project).

The "Game" sub-project is a compiled Game.dll which only acts as a basic application framework to initialize and update the Engine, essentially a skeleton application to run Reality (as the actual gameplay code is all in the Scripts). Since the bulk of code is contained in the Scripts, beyond that the Game.dll does very little: the Game.dll initializes the GUI, updates the World as appropriate within its application loop, has functions to provide for sending input to the server, and contains some customizable visual fx ParticleSystems written in C++ that are useful for low-level speed benefits.

To start your exploration of how the Game Demo code and Reality API work, read ScriptingSystem, DemoPlayer, NetworkingSystem, explore GameCore.cs in the Scripts project containing global Game Script logic, GameEngine.cpp in the Game project containing global Game App logic, and use the RealityAPI online docs & headers as structural guides to the Engine.

After playing on the level in multiplayer or watching one of the recorded games, it's recommended that you open the maps\FragIsleBeta.xml file in RealityBuilder to explore the scene as it was constructed. Please see the various topics under the Level Development section in the KnowledgeMenu for an overview of the different aspects of development involved in creating that level.

E-mail the developer's mailing list (you'll be subscribed upon receiving EvalKit access) if you have any questions pertaining to the various aspects of Reality, and we'll answer them.