Developed only a few years after WebGL was released and before WebGL was adopted in all browsers the Universe Engine was created by Opaque Media Group. The Universe Engine is a 3D WebGL-based multiplayer game engine running on all major browsers featuring a dedicated typescript & node.js server backend. It uses the custom-built Starlight renderer that runs real-time complex deferred scenes with hundreds of lights at that could run at 60fps on most computers available in 2014, nowadays support has been more widely adopted and this target can be hit on most phones as well.

The Universe Engine was used in a number of different projects including the health and education app Braaains and a browser based deployment of the VDE, as well as providing 3D capabilities for a number of commercial websites and was used at Swinburne as a teaching tool in an in-class AI competition.

I was instrumental in developing the Universe Engine, working on it from the start until it's retirement when it was out-competed by Unreal and Unity's web deployments. To date the Universe Engine and especially the Starlight renderer are one of my proudest accomplishments.

I designed and implemented the real-time deferred renderer the Starlight Renderer from it's architecture to system integrations to the file formats it used. I achieved a working version of the renderer including lighting and shadowing shaders before chrome implmented most WebGL errors (I was mostly working blind). Once browsers started reliably implementing extra extensions for WebGL I worked with a coworker to bring them into the renderer adding support for global illumination and finalising support for the Physically Based Rendering pipeline.

Aside from the Starlight Renderer I also had a prominent hand in configuring the networking systems, messaging/broadcast systems, component, entity and supporting systems for various gameplay elements, persistance and helping the integration of the Howitzer custom physics engine. I also reviewed and debugged a lot of my coworker's work in other areas as per Opaque's review practices.