NHTV's International Game Architecture and Design senior lecturer and team manager Jacco Bikker has released a new demo and source package for his Arauna real-time ray tracing application. The package - which includes static library files for building a demo application, three tutorial applications, and source code needed to build the libraries and the demo application - can be used freely for non-commercial applications.

According to the Bikker's site, Arauna is an experimental and stable real-time ray tracer developed specifically for game development. While the application isn't yet capable of delivering the performance needed to produce graphics comparable to modern games using a GPU, it is one of the fastest renderers in its class.

Arauna's features include "real-time ray tracing of large triangle meshes (up to 2M per 1GB of memory), full HDR pipeline with post-processing for HDR glow, recursive reflection and refraction, accurate shadows from an unlimited amount of point lights, texturing with bilinear filtering and normal mapping," and more.

Two games have been developed with Arauna so far, both of which were created by students enrolled in NHTV University of Applied Sciences' IGAD program. The most recently completed game, Let There Be Light (pictured), was released earlier this month and is available for download at the Arauna site.