How does the MB rendering engine work?

I don't know if this is the right place to put this.

I am just wondering the above (in both layman's terms and in technical speaking).


I'm just interested in how games work.

Don't have the effort/time to do a huge writeup tonight. Here are a few things you can look into that they use. Note: this is for MBG, as MBP's custom renderer uses entirely different methods.

OpenGL for rendering, it does all the 3d graphics and stuff.
Immediate mode rendering because this version of Torque was released before shaders really caught on.
Stencil shadow volumes for shadows. Compare to shadow mapping where the shadow values are stored in textures instead of geometry.
Gouraud shading smooths the light values between the different faces so you don't get choppy spheres or loops when there are a low number of polygons.
Binary Space Partitioning for optimizing the renderer. This speeds up time to draw the scene, but takes extra time because you need to build the BSP tree (map2dif does this for difs, and the game also does this when loading).

Jeff could go into more detail on most of these, as well as the wiki pages that I linked. It gets into advanced mathematics (linear algebra and calculus, hooray!) really fast, so be warned.

That's actually all I wanted to know! Thanks for that!

I don't think that the rendering engine uses Gouraud when you have shaders enabled. HiGuy please tell me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: confirmed

HiGuy wrote: MBP's custom renderer uses entirely different methods.

Threefolder wrote: I don't think that the rendering engine uses Gouraud when you have shaders enabled.

To elaborate, MBP's shader engine uses flat shading and the Blinn-Phong reflection model for the specular highlights. When developing the shader engine with Jeff, I switched back and forth between flat / Gouraud a number of times. The problem I found with Gouraud is that most geometry in Marble Blast is really flat, and the interpolation of normals in Gouraud shading can cause graphical glitches when faces don't slope smoothly. Unfortunately, using flat shading means that curves look choppy , but they're still reasonable so I went with it in the end.