Tetra, our award-winning game engine, is a free software solution to create immersive entertainment products, such as games; it is highly tailored and optimized to create content for our UHC metaverse “Life”, yet it can be used to create standalone executables. It collaborates easily with modelling applications such as Blender, Spline and Maya and you can easily edit your programmable logic in editors such as Atom, Visual Studio Code and Vim. Tetra can be used in combination with our Infinity SDK solution that provides a powerful authoring system, which allows you to seamlessly integrate game logic, game design resources and AI to enhance your experience. The Tetra editor, given you have moderate experience in HTML 5 and JavaScript, can be extended to your needs. Developers using the Tetra game engine require the Azarion status and are subject to verification.
The core of the Tetra game engine relies on three founding technologies - WebGPU, WebAssembly and Avenge (our propriety L1 blockchain). Let’s briefly go over these technologies.
WebGPU is a modern graphics API designed to provide high-performance, low-level access to the GPU for web applications. It enables us to harness the power of GPUs for advanced graphics and computation, surpassing the capabilities of its predecessors like WebGL. WebGPU offers better performance, more control over rendering pipelines, and improved support for compute shaders, making it ideal for sophisticated web-based graphics applications and games.
WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary instruction format for stack-based virtual machines, designed to enable high-performance execution of code on web platforms. It allows us to compile code from C and C++ into a format that can run efficiently in web browsers. WebAssembly provides near-native performance, making it ideal for computationally intensive tasks such as games and data processing, while maintaining cross-browser compatibility and security.
Avenge is a high-speed, secure and GameFi enabled blockchain, designed to support ultra high capacity networks for gaming. Avenge has its native Dynamic Digital Assets, which are a ground-breaking digital asset feature which allows tokens to be merged inside other assets, creating a private collection represented by a single interoperable object. Having its own consensus mechanisms, Avenge implements a low carbon footprint and super low transaction fees. The consensus mechanisms inside Avenge allows any player to perform lightweight validation.
Tetra is specifically designed, despite being extremely portable, to be compact and work with blockchain technologies at its core. Instead of being a bulky general-purpose 3D engine, it leaves customization free for developers to add to their own code. The design philosophy in Tetra is to develop in a modular way, but maintain a monolithic core. Instead of supporting countless file formats, it is streamlined internally to work with 3D models with GLB format and for audio in Opus format. The Tetra engine is inspired by engines such as the open source project Irrlicht and Blender Game Engine, keeping simplicity in mind, but enhanced with an advanced subsystem that supports indirect lighting, shadow mapping, post processing and countless other features. Tetra can run headless and entirely from its CLI (Command Line Interface), with networking options through using P2P or traditional server-client. You can run Tetra locally and connect to it using your web browser or develop your solutions directly online.
To develop in Tetra, you use its browser-based editor for 3D game development, which offers several advantages that enhance accessibility, collaboration, and efficiency. Being browser-based means it is platform-independent, allowing developers to work from any device with an internet connection, whether it's a PC, Mac, or even a tablet. This reduces the need for specific hardware or software installations, making the tool more accessible to a broader audience. Tetra supports real-time collaboration, enabling multiple developers to work on the same project simultaneously from different locations, without facing synchronization challenges using its easy locking system and version control. The Tetra editor leverages cloud storage, ensuring that your projects are automatically saved and backed up. This minimizes the risk of data loss and allows developers to easily access their work from any device and revert to previous versions if necessary. As Tetra is highly tailored to use distributed technologies and allows extensions, its browser-based editor is user-friendly and has a lower learning curve compared to traditional desktop applications. Tetra’s editor features intuitive interfaces and accessible design principles, making them suitable for beginners and experienced developers alike. Regular updates and new features are to be rolled out seamlessly, ensuring that users always have access to the latest functionalities without needing to manually download and install large updates. This makes Tetra the most eco-friendly choice for game developers and a powerful tool for individual developers and teams.
Tetra manages digital assets in its unique way through its native usage of our Layer 1 blockchain Avenge. Dynamic Digital Assets, or DDAs for short, allows you to create composite objects. These special containers have mutable and immutable properties - guaranteed, persistent and volatile states. Everything made in your entertainment product with Tetra is a digital asset, protecting your creations and yet providing the flexibility that otherwise would be a required trade-off on other platforms. They become immediately transferable of ownership, yet remain a history of origin. As a game developer in Tetra, you can create personalized and evolving digital content such as avatars, collectables and in-game items, which can be traded, leased, sold or used within and outside of our metaverse. One of the key features of Tetra is the usage of DDAs through designing them using our Infinity SDK, while they are managed and maintained on our Layer 1 blockchain Avenge. When you create your assets, you do not have to worry about traditional database management, scaling and centralization. This makes Tetra the one-of-a-kind game engine that saves a huge initial cost of ownership in regard to managing serialized objects - but where DDAs really shine are the features to use crossover avatars, items, vehicles - basically, anything supported by our metaverse is directly available to you as long as you have full or shared ownership of it.
Global Illumination refers to techniques that simulate how light bounces and interacts within a virtual environment. It enhances visual realism by calculating indirect lighting effects such as soft shadows, color bleeding, and ambient occlusion. These techniques mimic real-world lighting scenarios, improving the depth and atmosphere of game scenes. While computationally intensive, Tetra employs optimized algorithms to achieve convincing global illumination effects in real-time, striking a balance between visual fidelity and performance. We use a combination of precomputed light maps, light probes, and real-time algorithms such as SSAO and SSR to simulate global illumination effects, such as indirect lighting effects, ambient occlusion and reflections. Using our distributed system for baking lightmaps and progressive preview on GPU level, the generation time is a matter of minutes (!) and doesn’t require developers to invest in expensive hardware or endure long system lockups. The light mapping combined with our enhanced system for shadow mapping, allows developers to place unlimited static light sources for light flow calculation for individual surfaces.
The Tetra terrain rendering is optimized through combining similar draw calls, occlusion culling and rendering multiple instances of the same sections efficiently. The compute shaders do the heavy lifting for example tessellation or displacement mapping for detailed surfaces. Realistic landscapes consist of millions of polygons, which are optimized by Tetra by streaming textures and materials to greatly reduce the memory footprint and the user experience through its performance. Height maps are generated and stored as a composite digital asset, which preserves its state and uniqueness on the blockchain. Trees, vegetation, rocks and fauna zones can be designed carefree, from random spread to individual objects and are optimized including Level Of Detail features. Tetra uses terrain tiles that precompute collision detection and physics interactions for gameplay purposes, such as player movement, vehicle navigation, or projectile physics. These simplified geometries derived from the terrain tile are used to optimize collision detection performance while maintaining accuracy. This is also where Tetra stands out, as it is capable of streaming unlimited terrains through connecting neighbors, linking them together as a seamless, infinite world.
Rendering realistic water in Tetra involves our advanced shaders and physics simulations to simulate reflections, refractions, and dynamic surface movements. Water surfaces in Tetra are represented this way to achieve realistic transparency, reflections of surrounding environments, and refraction effects. From screen space reflections to dynamic wave patterns that respond to environmental conditions and interactions, Tetra can render foam, splashes, and underwater effects with particle systems and dynamic shader effects, such as depth-based blur. The buoyancy simulation in our water solution involves replicating the physics principles that govern the behavior of objects floating on or submerged in water. Tetra uses its physics engine to calculate buoyant forces based on the volume and density of objects, determining whether they float, sink, or remain at a specific depth. Objects interact dynamically with the water surface, adjusting their position and orientation according to buoyancy forces and any external influences such as wind or player interactions. With this realism, Tetra allows influencing game mechanics such as navigation, object interactions, and underwater exploration in games.