The MAD-Engine™

There are currently many commercial third party 3D engines available on the market. Although they are all great in their own way, we needed more functionality and control therefore we decided to develop our own core 3D graphics engine. We have invested a lot of time in the research and development of the MAD-Engine™ and it has proven to be one of the fastest and most cutting edge engines around. Here are some of the technical hardware acceleration features supported:

• Extensively utilizes Microsoft’s DirectX 9 graphics library
• Supports Hardware TnL (Transform and Lighting) acceleration by means of DirectX’s hardware shader language for maximum quality and performance (Vertex Shader 1.1 and Pixel Shader 1.1/1.4)
• Uses Mad Software’s new SMS™ technology (Shader Management System™) for dynamic shader segment parsing
• Supports up to 6 textures per rendering pass!
• In-shader hardware texture projection (including reflection and refraction)
• Mip-mapping
• 16x Anisotropic filtering
• Hardware bump-mapping (DOT3, Cubic environmental, and 2D environmental)
• Hardware extruded and projected stencil-based shadow volumes

By developing and maintaining our own proprietary MAD-Engine™, we are able to keep up to date with new Direct3D API changes, fix bugs fast, keep costs extremely low and tailor the engine to exactly what Mad F/X needs to support.

Shader Management System™ 1.0

The Shader Managment System™ 1.0 (SMS) is a powerful technology developed by Mad Software to harness the power of today's leading hardware accelerators and Direct3D's shader language. Currently hardware is limited to how many vertex/pixel shader instructions they support. SMS™ effectively combines shader segments to create one final optimized vertex and pixel shader to be used by the hardware. SMS™ is designed specifically for Mad F/X to expose all the capabilities of the Vertex Shader 1.1 and Pixel Shader 1.1/1.4 standards as way of easy-to-use shaders. Vertex buffers are managed and re-used efficiently to cut down on bandwidth. Vertex and pixel shader segments are prioritized and combined efficiently to take full advantage of the hardware's capabilities. SMS™ is fully dynamic and can be controled by an intuitive user interface and new shaders are created each time the user changes material settings. SMS also has a smart shader cache mechanism for dealing with changes in light counts and calculations.

The SMS™ also stores a copy of the shader in text format with comments for viewing from the user. Shaders are dynamically changed and updated in the Shader Preview window shown below. Here you see the Vertex Shader 1.1 and Pixel Shader 1.1/1.4 for a cubic EMBM material. This could be very usefull for experienced users and game or shader developers.

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Despite the recent availability of 3rd party shader parsers like Cg™ from NVidia and RenderMonkey™ from ATI, we needed more customizable functionality and better integration into Mad F/X so we will continue to use SMS™ exclusively giving us better results.

Shader Management System™ 2.0

The Shader Managment System™ 2.0 (SMS™) is under development. SMS™ 2.0 utilizes DirectX 9's shader language 2.0. SMS™ 2.0 will boast significantly larger instruction counts, more functionality. This in turn will let the user have more simultanious lights, better lighting models, more complex pixel shaders, better bump mapping and higher internal color and normal map accuracy. Look for SMS™ 2.0 to be part of Mad F/X™ 2.0.