Independent developer Tony Macaroni showcased a custom game engine he spent approximately eight months building. His forest and grassland roaming demo was recorded at 1440p, averaging around 130 FPS with an unlocked frame rate on an RTX 3080, and the related video garnered over 1.2 million views on YouTube within a few days.
Tony Macaroni stated that this engine was almost entirely written by himself. He had previously used Godot for a long time to experiment with technologies such as global illumination and virtual texturing, before shifting to a self-built architecture to achieve specific goals. Currently, the engine's feature set remains limited, with a focus on rendering large numbers of objects at high detail.
The engine uses clustered level-of-detail structures to form virtual geometry and represents distant objects with voxels; global illumination combines screen-space and voxel-based solutions without using ray tracing. The farthest objects use simplified proxy models that do not retain individual instance data. The developer also modified meshoptimizer to generate voxels while producing level-of-detail meshes.
In specific tests, the demo achieved around 200 FPS from a top-down perspective, dropping to about 80 FPS in the densest forest scenes; laptops equipped with mobile RTX 3070 GPUs maintained 60 FPS in most scenarios. The developer considers the RTX 2060 and RX 6400 as the theoretical minimum requirements for related features. The weather system was integrated early in the architectural development, though he admits its realism still needs further improvement.