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LIZARD™, THE ”GAME ENGINE”
For all “next generation” (Xbox 360, Playstation
3 and PC) products SimBin will have its own game
engine that is called Lizard. Lizard is fully
developed in-house and owned by the SimBin group of
companies.
The Lizard-engine contains all basic components
that are required in order to develop game products:
simulation, physics, rendering, networks, animation,
sound, user interface, data pipeline, editor and
tools. It is mainly written in the portable C++
programming language.
 Lizard
is a reusable engine, written with stability,
performance and developing efficiency in focus. In
the present situation, it is tailored to handle
racing games, but thanks to its modular structure, it is
prepared to constitute the basis for any type of
game. This gives SimBin the possibility to quickly
broaden the product portfolio with other genres, for
example a "First Person Shooter".
To use an in-house developed, reusable, game
engine is a very cost effective solution that gives
SimBin a lot of flexibility to handle new projects,
both its own IP’s or assigned productions. The
concept is the same that has been used the last
decades within the car manufacturing industry. In
order to create cost efficient and competitive new
cars, several car models from the same group are
built on the same platform. The basic architecture
is the same, but the experience is totally different
since the interior and exterior are unique.
Reusable game engines (sometimes referred to as
“middleware”) are no news in the game sector.
As a matter of fact, there is a large number of companies that offer
their middleware to game companies. Lizards big
advantage is that it is 100% developed and owned
by SimBin, which means that SimBin has all necessary
knowledge and can use it to pursue products that are
desired without having to pay external parties.
SimBin works continuously with the development of
Lizard focusing mainly on X-Box 360 and PC but will
be adapting it to other consoles such as the
PlayStation3.
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Simulation & Physics
* Reality-based simulation of racing cars.
* Takes aerodynamics, propulsion, tires, traction,
wheels, brakes and suspension into account.
* It simulates even the minute details such as weather
conditions, tire wear and temperature, fuel consumption
and a long list of realistic mechanical failures.
* Included are also driving aids, such as traction
control, antilock braking system, steer and stability
help.
* The AI supports different driving personalities and
behaviors.
Rendering Engine
* Support for both HDR and LDR rendering.
* Full use of hardware shaders.
* DX9 and Xbox 360 compatible.
* Cascaded shadow maps with smooth edges utilizing
percentage closer filtering (PCF).
* Advanced per-pixel lighting model with support for
dynamic time of day and fully dynamic shadows.
* Real-time reflections.
* Dynamic ambient occlusion.
* Advanced post processing pipeline (for example; full
screen motion blur and bloom).
* Static PVS.
* Animation with skinning.
* Deformable meshes.
* Undergrowth system.
* Weather effects.
Network Engine
* Advanced client side prediction.
* Bandwidth-throttling.
* Replay functionality, i.e. the recording,
synchronisation, and playback of data streams and input.
* True delta compression of data to minimize network
traffic.
* Accurate automatic time synchronization.
* Peer to Peer as well as Client / Server connectivity.
* Stats reporting.
* Match-making and LAN host discovery.
* Voice-support.
* Only uses a single UDP port to easily pass through
firewalls.
Sound Engine
* Written in C++ and intrinsics (SSE). All sound is
generated by software running in its own thread, the
hardware is only needed to playback the already fully
processed 2 or 6 channels (5.1).
* The sounds are created using custom made graphs with
each node acting as a (multi-) sample player, panner,
low-, high-pass filter or volume envelope etc.
* Has complete doppler support and makes use of spatial
information.
Menu System
* Layout is stored in XML files, which makes editing
easy.
* Support for Lua 5.1, a very efficient scripting
language. The Lua support makes it easy to expose game
functionality to the GUI system. It also makes it
possible to embed Lua scripts in the XML files, in order
to control the game or the GUI system itself.
* Efficient rendering, which makes the system suitable
for both in-game and front-end GUI.
* Highly portable, only the rendering part is
platform-specific and that is already abstracted by
Rendering Engine.
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Technology