Elegant Engineering

• Tombstone has a well-designed architecture that has been refined over many years.
• The source code for both the core engine and all of the tools is ultra-clean.
• The engine has minimal external dependencies, so there are no compatibility problems, and build times are extremely fast.
• The API is extremely consistent and intuitive.
• Everything has been cross-platform from the beginning.

Everything Invented Here

• We use our own Open Data Description Language for miscellaneous data storage like configuration files.
• We developed the Open Game Engine Exchange format to transfer data from modeling software to our editor.
• We have proprietary texture, sound, and movie formats.
• We have an advanced text system that uses our patent pending glyph rendering technology.
• We use our own container classes, math libraries, compression algorithms, networking protocols, and user interface widgets.

Graphics

• Full-scene dynamic lighting and shadows.
• Point, spot, and infinite light sources with texture projections.
• Hierarchical volumetric radiosity spaces for indirect lighting.
• Large-scale cascaded shadow mapping with parallel rendering support.
• Support for arbitrary custom cross-platform shaders.
• Comprehensive bump, normal, parallax, and horizon mapping capabilities.
• Physically based Cook-Torrance microfacet shading.
• Voxel-based smooth terrain based on our Transvoxel technology, which supports vertical cliffs, overhangs, caves, arches, etc., that are impossible with height-based terrain systems.
• Screen-space ambient occlusion (SSAO), cinematic motion blur, emission glow, specular bloom, and distortion effects such as heat haze and shockwaves.
• High-quality and high-performance procedural fire effects.
• Volumetric fog and volumetric light shaft effects.
• Interactive in-game interface panels.
• Particle systems and voxel-based blobs / metaballs.
• State-of-the-art indoor/outdoor visibility determination and lighting analysis using zones, portals, and cell graphs.
• High-quality impostor system for rendering large numbers of instanced objects like trees with fully dynamic lighting and shadows.
• Multiple level-of-detail rings with smooth fading and distance culling.
• External world referencing / instancing (for prefabs, etc.). Nested worlds supported.
• Skinning, morphing, and hierarchical animation blending.

Physics

• Rigid body simulation.
• Continuous collision detection.
• Contact forces and friction.
• Precise buoyancy forces.
• Customizable force fields.
• Joints (spherical, universal, discal, revolute, cylindrical, and prismatic).
• Real-time rope and cloth simulation.
• Real-time large-scale fluid surface simulation.
• Full networking support.

Tools

• World Editor runs as an engine plugin and uses the engine's own user interface system.
• Zero build time, so results are immediately visible while editing a level.
• Landscaping brushes enable complex combinations of objects like trees, grass, and rocks to be painted on the terrain.
• Custom shaders are edited graphically and work on all platforms without modification.
• Shaders automatically work with all types of light sources and atmospheric effects without having to explicitly create variations.
• Painting features provide spatially parameterized inputs to shaders so that material variation can be painted into the scene.
• Scripts are edited graphically for easy artist/designer access.
• Fully interactive in-game interface panels can be created graphically in a Panel Editor.

The best reasons NOT to use the Tombstone Engine

• You prefer code that's hastily written in order to ship features as quickly as possible. Everybody knows that any good codebase contains a ton of TODOs and FIXMEs. Something that works 90% of the time is good enough.
• You have surrendered yourself to the inevitability of frequent crashes in both the engine and the editor. You think you just have to live with it, and there's no practical way to have anything better.
• You don't mind if it takes 20 minutes to build the engine after a minor source change. You take dozens of coffee breaks every day anyway, and it's good for the computer to be doing something while you're away from your desk.
• You're OK with main parts of the engine being based on technology from the 1990s. What worked well then is still the right solution today!
• You think having lots of dependencies is good. Every engine should use four different string classes and at least seven 3D vector types, right? And it's your fault when your code breaks because an external library was updated.
• You don't get mad when wildly exaggerated claims about robustness or scalability turn out not to hold water. It's OK because those marketing crooks who bent the truth to convince you their product was solid were just doing their jobs!
• You enjoy working with a Frankensteinian architecture that was bolted together over two decades without any unifying vision, went through years of neglect by incompetent engineers, and is now held together with duct tape and string.