Design of a modern image generation engine for driving simulation

In 2007 Blue Newt Software began designing and building a new visual rendering system for visual simulation markets. The image generator, called PixelTransit, is built on top of our engine called Blue Sprocket. Our rendering technology has been instrumental in demonstrating to new customers how graphics hardware can be used not just to create better images, but to gain better insight into their simulated environments. Blue Sprocket was designed to address four core goals from a rendering perspective: improved performance, higher-quality, scalability, and improved lighting. The engine additionally was redesigned to use standards wherever possible, and to bring a degree of modularity and scalability not available in this domain. This paper will describe the design and implementation of this system and discuss current problems and future work to be done in this space.