Drag[en]gine Launcher news - Epsylon

Some new stuff has made it's way into the Drag[en]gine Game Engine which are noteworthy.

The first is a remake of the Terrain System. The old Terrain-Patch system with the grid like patches had not been that well for working with massive terrains and tricky terrains not possible in height-map based systems. The new terrain system now works with two different primitives giving total freedom to those requiring full control over their terrain and a very quick way to build terrain for the people with less time at their disposition.

The first is the Polygon. This terrain type is known in the volumetric version by a lot of people: Brushes. A polygon defines a planar convex polygon that can be cut into shape and textured quickly. It's best used for technical map geometry like walls or indoor scenes. More i will not say as this kind of primitives are well known.

The second is the Terrain Patch or Terrain Mesh ( I kept the old name for coding purpose ). The idea behind this terrain object is to be created in an external 3D application well suited to quickly build a landscape. In my project i use Blender3D for this and I have provided a simple export script. You create the terrain in your 3D application of choice and then export it into an XML based terrain file which you can then import into the mapeditor. No tweaking is needed during this stage. The power in this terrain type is the total freedom of texturing. You can use either Planar Projection ( like Polygons use or Height Map Terrains ) for quick texturing or you can go down to UV-mapping for individual parts of the Terrain Mesh for total control.

This system allows to easily separate Outdoor from Indoor modelling and allows you to use your 3D application of choice.

The second big achievement is the Drag[en]gine Launcher. A lot of discussion arised around licensing terms and how to provide an easy and quick way for using the engine. This problem is now solved using the DELaunch application. What it does is driving the Drag[en]gine by the means of a Game-XML file. This file describes all informations needed by the launcher to run your game. This way you do not have to get in contact with the game engine at all and you can fully concentrate on your scripts to get the most out of the engine. Furthermore Game-Managers can use those Game-XML files to easily manage games based on this engine. This also prevents you from linking against the engine, which would incure putting your work under GPL. Using the launcher you can choose whatever license you see fit. Furthermore the launcher uses the requirements you specified in the Game-XML file to check that the game is runnable on your machine. This way the engine is fully modular for the player and still there exists no additional work for the game creator as the launcher takes care of checking for any kind of problems. See the comments in the file below for indept informations about the requirements you can check for.

epsylon.degame.xml shows the layout of such a Game-XML file. All you need to make a game for this engine is to provide your scripts and such a file. No more work is required.

Furthermore the project received another helping hand: PickleHead. He is putting some hands on models. Screenshots will follow once they are ready. Have a nice day.