About seven years ago, I was working in the Snowdrop game engine team at Massive Entertainment. I was amazed by the engine's beautiful graphics, but also amazed by the amount of work needed by brilliant artists and programmers to do seemingly trivial things.

Naively thinking "There must be a simpler way...", I started experimenting with rendering games using ray tracing. Since then, I have spent thousands of hours tinkering with different data structures and algorithms. At last, I found a solution that is able to render dynamic voxel worlds using path tracing, at interactive frame rates. I think it is a pretty unique thing, so I have decided to take six months off from my regular work, to work full time on what I call Solid Engine.

Solid Engine is a game engine build around the idea that games can be both prettier and easier to make, if we take a step back and forgo the classic game development pipeline based on rasterizing polygons. Specifically, by using voxels instead of polygons as the most basic building block, and path tracing instead of rasterization for rendering, many of the things that AAA game engines struggle with today (detailed models and worlds, realistic dynamic lighting) comes easily. Read more about these ideas over at the Solid Engine webpage!

Since the engine itself is a huge project, I plan on releasing it bit by bit during the coming months. Hopefully, by the beginning of 2022, when I have to go back to the coal mines, the whole engine will have been open sourced. After that, I hope to get enough users and sponsors to motivate continued development at a rapid pace. My dream is to be able to work on Solid Engine part or full time going forward, and that is where sponsoring money comes in; it will quite literally pay the bills.

Got questions, feedback or ideas? Shoot me an email.