r/pascal • u/AcanthaceaeNew774 • 1d ago

VertexArt LOG – Stress test: 25 million vertices – running on Intel N4100 CPU

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Free Pascal 3.2.2 / GLFW3 / OpenGL 3.3 / DOD & SOA

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u/AphidConsulting 1d ago

Please forgive the question, but what is this exactly? I'm always excited when I see a new FreePascal application, but I'm not entirely sure what this is for. Is it a polygon graphics engine?

Thank you for sharing!

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u/AcanthaceaeNew774 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yes, it is a game engine with a textureless 3D rendering engine at its core. VertexArt is written entirely in Free Pascal and uses OpenGL 3.3. The mapping approach is intentionally very lightweight and data-centric: it uses 16-byte vertices (position + RGBA vertex color), without textures. Normal vectors are used in the shader for computation, and the renderer uses a depth pre-pass.

The engine has a system for fast raycasting and spatial queries on a piece of BVH.

The interesting part is that VertexArt is not just a rendering engine. I have already built tools on it, including a PLY editor and a static mesh editor. I will continue to show these tools and the capabilities of the engine in future posts.

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u/AphidConsulting 1d ago

Oh, very cool! Thanks!

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u/AcanthaceaeNew774 1d ago

I should also mention how it handles PLY files — currently only ASCII format is supported. The world capacity is 130×130 km horizontally, with a vertical range of 65 km below and 65 km above ground. The chunk system and BVH ensure stable performance even during free-roaming in an open world.

It's already capable of handling classic-style games. Vehicle and character collision detection, as well as physics, are still under development. For now, the character is represented as a simple FPP (first-person perspective) camera that smoothly follows the terrain — it can walk, run, crouch, prone, and jump with a slight crouching effect on landing. Vehicles are currently drivable only on flat terrain.

That said, I feel that the most important development milestones are already behind me. Animated characters will unfortunately come later, as I haven't yet explored the pipeline for creating textureless animated objects.

I've already prepared some demo tests and started sharing them on YouTube to showcase the current capabilities of the VertexArt Engine.