What is Continuum Engine?
Continuum is a game engine for a universe you can edit at every scale. You can change a single voxel in a book on a desk, pick up a building, place a city, and then pull back until that city is a speck on a planet in a galaxy. It is all one world, and it is voxel based all the way through.
I'm Don, the developer of Continuum. I've been building it on my own. As far as I know, it is the largest-scale fully editable simulation in the world. So far I haven't seen another engine like it, but it could be that I just haven't looked deep enough.
What the demonstration shows
The demonstration I've been showing people starts in a hotel room overlooking Shibuya crossing. You can edit every tiny detail in that room, down to the individual voxels of a book. Then you zoom out, pick up the book and edit the rest of the room. Then you pick up a building, place a city, and keep going out to Earth and the galaxy, at 1:1 scale.
There are no cutscenes and no loading screens on the way. The data model and the renderer stay the same the whole time, except for the switch between the planet's spherical coordinates and ordinary Cartesian space. Editing a small object and moving something much larger are part of the same workflow, and that is the part I care about most.
Worlds too large to build by hand
A world this big has an obvious problem: somebody has to make the places worth visiting. Agents can help with that. The buildings around Shibuya in the demonstration were authored by agents through Continuum's authoring workflow, and the scenes were inspected in the engine. They are agent-built, and I label them that way when I show them.
What I want it to become
This part is the vision, not something you can play yet. I want a single world where you scroll from a galaxy map down to a village street and talk to a peasant whose life is shaped by your empire-level decisions, with no loading screens and no mode switches. Something like Civilization, except you can go in and interact with everything, a bit like GTA. The same world can hold a personal story and a civilization's future.
I also want agents to live there. They would talk to you and be native inhabitants of the world, alongside the people playing.
Where it stands
Continuum is in development. There is an early shared-world prototype on a hosted server, but nobody outside can join it yet. This is a soft launch now, and the actual release will be much later. It won't really be a game at first: the plan is for the first thing people do to be building, with richer game systems after that.
If you want development updates and a chance at a future playtest invitation, the waitlist is on the homepage.