Keen Software House Game Engine

VRAGE

VRAGE™ is an in-house game engine developed by Keen Software House. VRAGE stands for “volumetric rage” and/or “voxel rage”.

VRAGE’s core feature is volumetricity within the environment. Volumetric objects are structures composed from block-like modules interlocked in a grid.

Volumetric objects behave like real physical objects with mass, inertia and velocity. Individual modules have real volume and storage capacity and can be assembled, disassembled, deformed and destroyed.

You could participate on the development of our in-house game engine VRAGE! We are always looking for new colleagues who seek technical and artistic excellence and who like to push their limits.

Check out our CAREER page for current job openings and be part of the VRAGE future! 

Key Features

  1. Real Physics

    Destructible, deformable and persistent environment. Havok Physics and Havok Destruction

  2. Volumetric Objects

    Modular block-like structures interlocked in a grid; Multiple block sizes

  3. Rendering Engine

    Deferred shading Dynamic and deformable geometry, Real-time dynamic global illumination, Procedurally generated grass, Physically based rendering, HDR lighting with soft-shadows, GPU Particle effects with particle editor and Post-processing effects

  4. Voxel Terrain

    Free-form volumetric surface; multi-material, mineable and fully destructible. Multiple levels of LOD transition and procedurally generated in real-time!

  5. Multiplayer

    Support for dedicated servers, streaming technology to replicate parts of the world on client and position synchronization with physics prediction

  6. Character animation

    System with inverse kinematics and ragdoll

Video & VRAGE Talks

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  • Space Engineers: Now out of Early Access!

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  • Space Engineers - Planets!

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  • Space Engineers - Alpha Footage 8/2013

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  • Miner Wars 2081 - VRAGE source code released

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VRAGE 1.0

VRAGE 1.0 was built and tailored specifically for Miner Wars 2081 and its core feature is the destructible voxel terrain and open-world environment.

Full source code is public and available here.

VRAGE 2.0

The VRAGE 2.0 engine is designed to support extremely large and fully dynamic and destructible environments, including planets with up to 120 km in diameter and a surface area of 45 238 km2, large space ships and any other creations built by the players. VRAGE empowers our community to build everything they want in space and on planets!

Due to Medieval Engineers development, VRAGE received a fresh upgrade: structural integrity and DirectX 11 rendering. With the addition of planets to Space Engineers, the engine went through a major upgrade to support large scale volumetric entities.

VRAGE 3.0

We are currently in the Research and development phase, exploring new features of the VRAGE engine! Our goal is to support extremely large and fully dynamic and destructible environments, including planets, large spaceships, and any other creations built by the players.

  • DX12
  • Data-oriented design
  • Multi-core CPU support
  • GPU driven pipeline
  • Improved voxel system
  • Multiplatform
We are always looking for new colleagues who seek technical and artistic excellence and who like to push their limits.

Check out our CAREER page for current job openings and be part of the VRAGE future! 

Research Areas

We are actively researching improvements to the VRAGE engine. Here are some of the major research areas we are pursuing:

Real Physics
  • Realistic Water Physics
  • Latest Havok
  • Stable chains of constraints (i.e. rotors & pistons)
  • Planets, moons, asteroids
  • Volumetric objects and voxel terrain
  • Static and dynamic objects
  • Destructible, deformable and persistent environment
  • Super-large worlds
Volumetric Objects
  • Modular block-like structures interlocked in a grid
  • Unified block size
Voxel Terrain
  • Free-form volumetric surface
  • Multi-material, mineable and fully destructible
  • Multiple levels of LOD transition
  • High resolution terrain
  • Procedurally generated in real-time
Rendering Engine
  • GPU driven pipeline
  • Raytracing
  • Deferred rendering
  • Dynamic and deformable geometry
  • Real-time dynamic global illumination
  • Physically based rendering
  • Material system supporting Tessellation, parallax occlusion mapping and more
  • HDR lighting with soft-shadows
  • Directional, point, spot, tube and area light sources
  • Volumetric clouds and fog
  • GPU Particle effects
  • Post-processing effects; ToneMapping, Eye adaptation, Bloom, HBAO, TAA (anti-aliasing)
  • First-person and third-person camera
  • Foliage system for dense forests and grass
Animation and AI system
  • Animation controller with mixers and sub-states
  • IK for head, hands and feet, extensible for custom usage
  • Active Ragdoll driven by animation system
  • Server – Client synchronization
  • Animation data streaming keeping fixed memory footprint
  • Level of detail allowing any number of animated characters
  • AI based on Kythera solution
  • All degrees of freedom for NPC movement
  • Goal oriented AI
Multiplayer
  • Inherent Client-server architecture
  • Support for both dedicated servers and in-game server
  • Streaming technology to replicate parts of the world on client
  • Position synchronization with physics prediction
UI
  • XAML based UI system
  • Vector based UI rendering, using Slug middleware
  • Resolution independent, pixel precise
Audio
  • Based on FMod middleware
  • Spatial, geometry based sound modeling
  • Music controlled by situation context
Tools
  • Performance Profiler – real-time statistics: rendering, physics, game-play, networking
  • Content pipeline App – command line application used to import assets into Content
  • VRAGE HUB; Project and VRAGE Editor manager based on Avalonia UI library
  • VRAGE Editor 

Join us

Are you keen on making a meaningful impact? Interested in joining the Keen Software House team?

Career