The Horde - Ray Tracing Tech Demo

The Horde - RT tech demo

Enter a dark, torch-lit ruin powered by native Vulkan hardware ray tracing. Horde Lantern RT is an early historical-gothic action showcase for Windows and compatible Android phones, built around wet stone, dynamic firelight, ray-traced shadows, reflective materials, and an animated skeletal enemy.

This is a focused technology demo rather than a complete game. It uses real Vulkan acceleration structures and vkCmdTraceRaysKHR presentation. There is no raster, browser, screen-space, or simulated ray-tracing fallback.

What’s in this alpha

• A dark gothic corridor and ray-traced material gallery
• Warm dynamic torchlight and shadows
• Wet cobblestone, mossy masonry, aged metal, and other PBR materials
• An articulated first-person body with a held torch and sword
• A compact encounter with one animated skeleton
• Approach, attack, sword-hit, death, and respawn behaviour
• A bounded thin clear-glass transmission effect
• Footsteps, combat sounds, enemy cues, and interface audio
• Adjustable ray-tracing render resolution
• Clear hardware-support and rendering diagnostics

Android phone version

The Android version runs the same native Vulkan hardware-ray-traced scene using a phone-safe ray-query path inside the real ray-tracing frame dispatch. Materials use compressed ASTC textures selected only when the phone exposes the required support. Unsupported devices display a clear diagnostic instead of silently switching to a non-ray-traced renderer.

The primary test phone is the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra (SM-S948B). The current build has been tested on this device with native RT swapchain presentation, compressed PBR materials, animated skeleton rendering, touch movement, 360-degree camera control, and basic sword combat (you can swing it).

Sustained warm testing on the Galaxy S26 Ultra remained around 46-49 FPS after extended use, registering thermal status 2 (mild throttling), at native resolution (MUCH higher at lower resolution scale). Shorter, cooler validation samples performed faster. Results will vary with device, temperature, resolution, and power settings.

Android touch controls

• Drag on the left side: Walk and strafe
• Drag on the right side: Look around with full 360-degree turning
• SWING: Attack with the sword
• Menu: Pause, resume, restart, change settings, or view diagnostics
• Android Back: Pause or return from a menu

Windows controls

• WASD: Move and strafe
• Left mouse drag: Look around
• Right mouse or Space: Swing the sword
• Esc: Pause or resume
• R: Restart the route
• F1: Show controls
• F2: Show ray-tracing diagnostics
• Alt + Enter: Toggle fullscreen

Compatibility

Android

• A 64-bit Android phone with hardware Vulkan ray tracing
• Vulkan acceleration-structure, ray-tracing-pipeline, ray-query, and buffer-device-address support
• Required ASTC texture-format support
• Currently verified on Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra (SM-S948B)

Windows

• Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64-bit
• A hardware ray-tracing-capable Vulkan GPU
• A current graphics driver with Vulkan ray-tracing and ray-query support
• Currently verified on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop GPU

Hardware support is intentionally narrow during this alpha. Other ray-tracing-capable phones and GPUs may work, but have not yet been verified. If the required Vulkan or Android ASTC features are unavailable, the app reports the missing capability rather than presenting a misleading fallback.

Alpha notice

This initial showing presents the rendering foundation, atmospheric corridor, material work, held equipment, and a small one-enemy combat loop. It is not yet a complete game. Performance, compatibility, presentation, and content will continue to evolve.


https://github.com/Samfa12-tech/The-Horde-RT-demo

Credits and licences

• Environment materials: Poly Haven — CC0.
• Sound effects: FilmCow Royalty Free Sound Effects Library — FilmCow custom royalty-free licence.
• Skeleton derivative: original Free Stylized Dark Fantasy Skeleton by Hotstrike Studio; texture, rig, and animation processing created with Meshy — CC BY 4.0.
• Full asset provenance and licence details.

AI assistance disclosure

AI tools assisted code development. Meshy was used to texture, rig, and animate the credited Hotstrike Studio skeleton derivative. OpenAI image generation was used to create the application icon.