About Epsylon with
by Dragonlord on Dec 6th, 2012
A very long time passed since the last news. One reason had been me moving to a new place which took longer than expect. Then there had been lots of work too correlated to show by its own. And finaly but not least there had been some nasty incidents at ModDB where somebody with site moderator power (as it seems) vandalizing the profile of my project which I restored. Due to this incidents though I put a news ban on ModDB which had been in effect since somewhere the beginning of this year. In the mean time though a couple of people asked me to lift the ban. When I found a way to protect my work by reworking the Wiki to host the articles I decided to lift the ban as on my wiki my work is safe. I don't want to warm up this story more than I just did. Important now is only that ban is lifted. For me this incident is now a matter of the past and shall stay there. Let's move on to what is really important.
Drag[en]gine Wiki Overhaul
The Drag[en]gine Wiki has been completely overhauled. To help prepare for a future release of the game engine this wiki is turned into the SDK and first source of information. Hence it is made for the developers wishing to work with the game engine. Especially in light of the incidents that happened the wiki has been modified to hold also all the articles from now on. I'll now only make short bullet lists of what has happened linking to the wiki pages. No articles will be posted anymore on ModDB (on my wiki they can't be vandelized). The articles contain in depth details. It's really worth reading them if you want to know all over the Drag[en]gine.
The Big What Has Happened In All The Month List!
Here the list of what happened during all these month. Click on the links for detailed articles about the topic:
- Better organized texture property listing
- New modules listing with individual pages per module: See OpenGL
- Physically Based Rendering for better materials, lighting condition independent material creation and a lot easier for artists to create materials with. In short a superior system for artists and game developers to work with.
- New texture properties for PBR: reflectivity, roughness with artists aid chart, roughness.remap.lower, roughness.remap.upper, environmentmap.
- Normal map strength support: alter normal map influence if required dynamically
- Tintable materials: dynamic, run-time tinting of materials for higher diversity. Overwrite for individual textures inside the world editor. It's a pure game script approach so you can change and extend all this to your hearts desire in your game scripts.
- Dynamic environment maps
- Occlusion Mesh System with implementation details about the new occlusion testing system
- Trigger expression editor in the world editor with live trigger table to test your trigger expressions
- Tree Branch Unwrap script for ngplant generated trees imported in Blender3D
- Various trees for the streets with ngplant
- First Mission Map "Old Industrial Area" (in Video). Various models for it: railings, bollards, tree grates, traffic signs (configurable text and symbol rendered at run-time; no texture required), traffic lights (dynamic lights using dynamic skins; switching states using triggers), poles and carriers for traffic signs and lights, company name panels, garbage bins, chairs and so forth, pipes and decals
- Various materials based on PBR
- Generic facades. Modular system. Facades for base and upper floors. Windows with dynamic day/night lit/unlit cycles using a random scheduler (in Video). Large variation using tintable materials
- LOD System with intelligent error metric
- Tree Canopy LOD
- Ladder interaction. Realistic ladder usage with full body motion feedback and fluid controls (in Video)
- Lighting improvement in shadow areas
- AO Fresnel reduction for PBR
- Various Blender3D scripts for exporting and tools including normal conversion tool (GBuffer NormGen) all written for Blender 2.65 taking advantage of new features
- Decals have now texture transform support (texture animation support)
- New texture properties: texcoord.clamp and texcoord.scale
And here a video showing the Old Industrial Zone map. Cut together various video clips to give a little overview of the map, the game controls, the movie camera and other stuff. Please excuse the frame rate but GLC gets into problems once the GPU memory is crammed full. I'm working on improving that. Also the video codec killed the night scenes so I cut out most of it as it is too dark to see. See the Map Screenshots for more images including night scene how it really looks like.
Two example screenshots I uploaded also here. The rest you find in the Map Screenshots Gallery.
It's time now for an overdue all important addition to the shader system to allow for even more power and versatility that I need to get that performance punch to crank up frame rates. My Radeon 4870 HD is not the youngest and most powerful graphic card anymore but I have the will to get the most punch out of it with my engine. Besides this I want to get the first mission into a playable state with first investigation work going on. A lot of the required engine work is done already. And that is the most time consuming part so far. Furthermore more articles will be moved one by one to the safety of the Wiki.
Sorry to hear about the incidencies, and great to hear there will be some news. I just compared Dragen and NAxis and now I'm mostly sure what engine I will use.
Would be interesting to hear the choice although I can image what it will be (unless OS is of importance).
Actually, I chose Dragen :D
Really, NeoAxis just seems overhyped to me. I have been watching it for some time now, and made some prototypes with it. Immediately ran into performance problems and the lack of some basic functions didn't add to it's score either.
Can't judge NeoAxis at all. I just know the specs from the website they have.
At the first glance, it looks really nice. Nice architecture, great graphics and all, but when you actually get to work with it, you notice how it is horribly unoptimized, the engine itself loads ten minutes on a high-end computer and the "powerful editors" only hinder the design process. I think these are the reasons why only a few games are based on NeoAxis.
Commander keen is correct in alot of what he is saying about Neo Axis. I have been using it for 3 years now.. Designing wise is very simple. But the engine itself cannot handle many many objects on a terrain at once.
The tools though with Neo is very easy to learn to use.. But you can't create the kind of scenes and stuff where almost any system can run them.. Hell I got a real good top of the line computer and can barely run some of my own maps. The engine is not optimized enough to really put out what I want out of my game.
Moddb.com <--My game.
I got a few questions for you about your engine. Texture wise. Can you use normal maps on all objects and also the terrain as well? Can you create huge open terrains anywhere from 10k x 10k large? Do you have the ability to use one layer for a huge color map that covers the entire terrain and a 2nd to use detail textures over it?
What type of entity system does your engine use? And how easy it is to work with?
What about programming? Can you use C# or is it some type of other system all together like scripting?
What renderer are you using? Is the renderer self made or is it something you pieced together?
What file types can be used to import into your engine? What is the file format for your objects?
Is there any way I could test your engine? Would you also be looking for some one whom can model and help you put assets into your game engine and create demo's for you?
Texture properties can be used on anything including objects, terrains and decals. So yes, normals maps and company work also on terrains.
The size of the terrain is basically unrestricted as positioning is done using doubles. The hardware is the limit there (as well as the users choice of modules).
Currently only a texture-splatting system is used for height terrains. I've got though plans for a "special" texturing way of the terrain but I'm not going to talk about that until I've implemented and tested it.
Entity system is fully defined by the Scripting Module of your choice. The game engine knows nothing about entities. In the DragonScript Scripting Module entities are class based so there should be nothing you can not do without creating a new sub-class of existing entity classes.
Concerning programming as mentioned above this depends on what Scripting Module you choose. Available will be DragonScript, Smalltalk and Python for the beginning, more will follow later. You interact with the engine only through the script language of choice.
Self made renderer. What renderer is used in the end though depends on the players choice of Graphic Module. Currently only an OpenGL module is available which uses a renderer written entirely from scratch.
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In general all file types a module exists for. Currently these are:
models: .model (self created binary model format, export from blender)
skins: .skin.xml (self defined xml format, editable with IGDE)
rigs: .rig.xml (self define xml format, editable with IGDE +export from blender)
fonts: .font.xml (self defined xml format, editable with IGDE)
animation: .anim (self defined binary format, export from blender)
language pack: .lang.xml (self defined xml format)
images: .png (using libpng)
sounds: .ogg (using libogg/libvorbis)
videos: .ogv (using libtheora/libvorbis)
What you mean with "file format for objects"? Everything map related is stored in .world.xml files editable with the IGDE.
Currently the engine is not yet available for testing as I'm still adding stuff to it and I don't want to risk API hell. There had been once plans for an engine only demo but this has been dropped due to the lack of helping hands.
Well you already answered the file format for objects question. The .model formats is the object formats. Mainly that was what I was asking. Your standard model format. Sadly though I don't use blender to create and export models with. I find blender confusing and clunky I use 3Ds Max to create models and stuff with.
As for help though I could help you create game models and stuff. And give you some real nice models to create worlds with. depending on what your wanting to make a demo of. I noticed you had a real kewl looking Robot in one of your pics. I got alot of robots and vehicles I could give you if you wanted to create some type of robot game. I even have a nice robot dragon as well.
Well then I hope I won't fall victim to this. But if worse comes to worse the editor modules can be improved or new ones made easily.