Tesseract Open-Source Engine Handles GL3, Oculus Rift

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Gaming on 26 December 2013 at 12:57 AM EST. 2 Comments
LINUX GAMING
While in some of the past years we have seen new Sauerbraten / Cube 2 game releases around Christmas and the end of the year, there's no indications of any imminent releases this year, but the Tesseract fork is continuing to show signs of hope for another non-ioquake3-based game engine with improved visuals. Tesseract is derived from Cube 2: Sauerbraten but with much better visuals.

I first talked about Tesseract on Phoronix in early 2012 as vastly improving graphics over Cube 2 and at the end of 2012 Tesseract was still running strong and picking up modern engine functionality.

It's been a long time since the last Tesseract update on Phoronix, but I'm happy to report that after thinking about the project and subsequently looking into it a few hours ago, the project is still running strong. The most recent commits to Tesseract's SVN repository is just hours old.

Tesseract recently has picked up features like SDL2 and even Oculus Rift VR support. Tesseract can also create OpenGL 3.0+ Core and OpenGL 2.1 legacy contexts, deferred MSAA/CSS, FXAA, sub-pixel Morphological Anti-Aliasing, and temporal Anti-Aliasing.

Over Sauerbraten, Tesseract also has support for deferred shading, omni-directional point lights, perspective projection spotlight shadowmaps, HDR rendering, real-time diffuse global illumination, and other new and improved graphical features over the aging Cube Engine code-base.

While there isn't a Tesseract release to report on at this time, for those wanting to learn more or to perhaps help out this open-source game engine project, visit their new project site at Tesseract.gg. For graphics geeks, there's also a long article about the Tesseract rendering pipeline.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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