Tag: Engine

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Flax Engine Released

The Flax Engine game engine has just seen it’s 1.0 release. We’ve had our eyes on this engine since it’s first public beta in 2018, which was then followed by a few years of radio silence. The in July of 2020 we got the 0.7 release which added several new features including C++ live scripting support. With today’s release the Flax Engine is now available to everyone.

Key features include:

  • Seamless C# and C++ scripting
  • Automatic draw calls batching and instancing
  • Every asset is using async content streaming by default
  • Cross-platform support (Windows, Linux, Android, PS4. Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, UWP…)
  • GPU Lightmaps Baking
  • Visual Scripting
  • VFX tools
  • Nested prefabs
  • Gameplay Globals for technical artists
  • Open World Tools (terrain, foliage, fog, levels streaming)
  • Hot-reloading C#/C++ in Editor
  • Full source-code available
  • Direct communication and help from engine devs
  • Lightweight development (full repo clone + compilation in less than 3 min)

Flax is available for Windows and Linux developers with the source code available on GitHub. Flax is a commercial game engine, but under fairly liberal terms. Commercial license terms are:

Use Flax for free, pay 4% when you release (above first $25k per quarter). Flax Engine and all related tools, all features, all supported platforms, all source code, all complete projects and Flax Samples with regular updates can be used for free.

If you want to learn more about Flax Engine, be sure to check out the following links:

You can learn more about the game engine and see it in action in the video below. Stay tuned for a more in-depth technical video on Flax Engine in the future.

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Core Engine Monetization With Perks

Developers creating games using the Core game engine can now make money from their creation with the newly announced Perks monetization system. Lagging behind user content platforms like YouTube and Twitch, creating game content is becoming hotter and hotter. With the recent massive IPO of Roblox revealing that developers just made 1/4 billion dollars on the platform it’s obvious there is money to be made here. With the Perks monetization system, Manticore Games are offering developers a much more equitable 50% share instead of the 24.5% currently earned by Roblox developers.

Details from the Core Perks announcement blog:

With Perks, monetizing your games is easy. Simply put, Perks are in-game purchases built specifically for Core. They allow creators to sell in-game benefits and earn Credits from players. Players buy Perks with Core Credits, which creators can then easily convert to fiat (real) currency.

In just a few simple steps, you can make your game free-to-play or premium, require a membership, offer expansion packs, or whatever you want. No matter how you choose to engage and entice your players, we make it simple. And if after going in one economic direction you decide to pivot to another, you can change it up very quickly. Perks always gives you full control over the economics of your games.

Another significant difference is how developers make money and what is covered by the platform. In addition to double the earnings, the Core platform will also be taking care of a bigger portion of the workload as illustrated in this graphic.

Core Costs covered vs Roblox and Steam AppStore Etc

The Core Platform is powered by Unreal Engine and Epic Games have recently taken a stake in the company illustrating a certain belief in the idea. We went hands-on with the Core Engine when the open alpha release was announced. You can check out the video below to learn more about Core and the new Perks monetization program.

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Wave Engine 3.1 Released

Wave Engine recently released version 3.1. Wave Engine is a completely free to use 3D game engine capable of targeting most platforms and XR devices. We have been keeping an eye on this engine since 2015 when we featured it in the Closer Look series. More recently we looked at Wave Engine again in 2019 when WaveEngine 3.0 was previewed after a long period of silence. After another long period of silence we received the 3.1 release which brings .NET 5 and C# 9 support as well as graphical improvements.

Details from a guest post on the DotNet team blog:

We are glad to announce that, aligned with Microsoft, we have just released WaveEngine 3.1 with official support for .NET 5 and C# 9. So if you are using C# and .NET 5, you can start creating 3D apps based on .NET 5 today. Download it from the WaveEngine download page right now and start creating 3D apps based on .NET 5 today. We would like to share with you our journey migrating from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5, as well as some of the new features made possible with .NET 5.

From .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 5

To make this possible we started working on this one year ago, when we decide to rewrite our low-level graphics abstraction API to support the new Vulkan, DirectX12 and Metal graphics APIs. At that time, it was a project based on .NET Framework with an editor based on GTK# which had problems to support new resolutions, multiscreen or the new DPI standards. At that time, we were following all the great advances in performance that Microsoft was doing in .NET Core and the future framework called .NET 5 and we decided that we had to align our engine with this to take advantage of all the new performance features, so we started writing a new editor based on WPF and .NET Core and changed all our extensions and libraries to .NET Core. This took us one year of hard work but the results comparing our old version 2.5 and the new one 3.1 in terms of performance and memory usage are awesome, around 4-5x faster.

Now we have official support for .NET 5 and this technology is ready for .NET 6 so we are glad to become one of the first engines to support it.

In the video below we review Wave Engine 3.1. All of the samples used in the video are available on GitHub. Please note this repository should not be cloned, it simply links to a different repository for each sample.

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GDevelop Game Engine Revisted

We first looked at the GDevelop game engine back in 2017 in our Closer Look Game Engine series. In the intervening years, GDevelop 5 has come a long way, bringing more and more features to this impressive open source cross platform 2D game engine. In the past year there have been over a dozen new beta releases to the engine including several community contributions. There have also been some updates as a result of the 2020 Google Summer of Code. While many of these releases aren’t large enough to justify a video, taken as a whole it is certainly time to revisit this game engine and the improvements it has seen.

Some of the highlights of recent releases include:

  • add support for a new asset store with hundreds of ready made game objects
  • new analytics system without requiring a third party solution
  • better support for right to left languages
  • support for dynamic 2D lights
  • customizable keyboard shortcuts
  • peer to peer communication extension
  • live preview (hot reloading) support
  • command palette for quickly launching editors
  • new editor themes

These are just a few highlights of the dozens of releases over the last few months. If you are interested in checking out GDevelop it’s available for Windows, Mac, Linux and Online. It is also an open source project with the source code available on GitHub under the MIT open source license. If you want to learn more or run into problems, be sure to check out their Discord server. You can learn more about GDevelop and see it in action in the video below.

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Babylon.JS 4.2 Game Engine Released

Babylon.js, the open source 3D web based game engine, just released version 4.2 with a ton of new features and tools. Key features of the 4.2 release include:

  • New particle editor for direct creation of particle systems in the Inspector
New Node System in Babylon.js
  • new Sprite Editor built into the Inspector to create, control and save sprites
  • new Skeleton viewer to visual bones and bone weights in Inspector
  • texture inspector for debugging texture issues
  • PBR support in the Node material editor with access to metallic, roughness, clearcoat, sheen etc when creating materials
  • new Procedural Texture, Particle Shader, Post Processing modes added to the Node editor
  • reusable frames in Node Material editor, enabling you to reuse shader code between projects easily
  • playground templates, essentially quick access code snippets in the code editor using Ctrl+Space
  • direct support for pre-filtered .hdr files
  • support for React Native for creating native applications
  • KTX + Basis U texture compression support
  • much, much more

You can learn more about the release in this article here or by watching the video below. Babylon.js is an open source project under the Apache 2 license with the source code available on GitHub. If you are interested in learning more about Babylon, be sure to check out our older Babylon.js tutorial series.

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The Machinery Game Engine Enters Open Beta

The Machinery by Our Machinery is an in development professional game engine that just entered open beta. We went hands-on with The Machinery earlier in the year when it was still in closed beta if you want an in-depth but slightly out of date hands-on experience. With the move to open beta all you need to do is register an account and download the engine to get started.

In a world dominated with game engines, what makes The Machinery unique? This engine is being developed by members behind the Stingray/BitSquid engines, used in such titles as Magicka and Warhammer Vermintide. The engine is light weight, modular and written in the C language with a focus on customizibility. Details from the open beta announcement:

If you are still wondering what The Machinery is, it’s a new lightweight and flexible game engine, designed to give you all the power of a modern engine in a minimalistic package that is easy to understand, extend, explore, rewrite, and hack. Beyond games, the API can also be used for simulations and visualizations as well as building custom tools, editors, and applications. 

 Some of the things that make The Machinery more hackable than other game engines are:

  • The Machinery’s API is written in C. It’s easy to understand without learning the complexities of modern C++. And don’t worry, you still have type-safe vectors and hash tables, just as in C++.
  • We use a modular design that is completely plugin-based. This makes it easy to extend and replace parts of the engine.
  • The engine can be stripped down to a minimalistic core. Don’t need physics, animation, or sound? Just ship the engine without those DLLs.
  • Individual DLLs can be hot-reloaded. You can modify gameplay, UI, etc, while the editor is running.
  • The codebase is small, readable and well documented.
  • We offer licenses with full source code for both small and large developers. 

You can learn more about The Machinery open beta and a quick hands-on/getting started guide in the video below.

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001 Game Creator Humble Bundle

The 001 Game Creator game engine is currently featured in the Game Dev STEM Humble Bundle that just launched. 001 Game Creator was previously featured in a Humble, so be sure to check your library to make sure you aren’t purchasing it twice. If you are interested in learning more about 001 Game Creator, check out our hands-on review available here.

As with all Humbles, this bundle is organized into tiers:

1$ Tier

  • Misc design documents

10$ Tier

  • 001 Game Creator Engine
  • 001 Basics E-Book
  • 001 Resource E-Book

20$ Tier

  • Point and Click Adventure Kit
  • Dragons Den Resource Pack
  • Retro Fantasy Music Pack
  • Sound Effects Pack Vol 1

25$ Tier

  • Enhanced RPG Kit
  • FPS Kit
  • MMORPG Kit
  • Visual Novel Kit

As with all Humble Bundles you get to decide how your money is allocated between the publisher, charity, Humble and if you so choose (and thanks if you do!) to support GFS using this link. You can learn more about the bundle in the video below.

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microStudio Game Engine Hands-On

microStudio is a game engine that runs entirely in your browser and makes it incredibly easy to get started creating 2D games, with a polished, well designed, comprehensive and documented set of tools. You can start as easily as going to microStudio.dev in your browser, clone an existing or create a new project and start coding, no account creation required.

Key features of microStudio include:

  • entirely browser based, no install or account creation required
  • simple Lua inspired programming language microScript
  • built in multi-file code editor with contextual documentation and syntax highlighting
  • run your game directly in browser or remote test on phones with live loading
  • pixel art editor
  • tile map editor
  • support for multiple devs with automatic synchronisation of changes
  • deploy your game as HTML5, or beta export support for Windows, Mac and Linux

You can learn more about microStudio and see in it action in the video below (or Odysee here). If you want to learn more or encounter a problem check out their discord server.

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Drag[en]gine Hands-On

The Drag[en]gine is a highly modular, open source (C++) game engine that has been under active development for several years. The Drag[en]gine’s modular approach is built around the GLEM concept breaking your game project into the Game Script, Launcher, Engine and Modules layers. The Game Script is implemented by default in Dragonscript, another open source project available here. Drag[en]gine is open source under the LGPL license on GitHub.

If you want to get started with Drag[en]gine you can download binaries for Linux and Windows available here, it’s most likely the IGDE file you want to start with. There are a number of samples to get you started available here. You can learn more about Drag[en]gine in the video below.

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Cocos Creator 3.0 Tech Preview Released

The free Cocos Creator game engine just got a heavy duty upgrade today, with the release of Cocos Creator 3D technical preview. This release adds an all new 3D game engine to Cocos Creator, which was previously a 2D only game engine. The new underlying 3D engine has a complete PBR based rendering workflow based on real world lighting and camera models, with a modular design with support for terrain and physics out of the box.

Details from the Cocos Blog:

The technology behind games has grown exponentially since the birth of video games. Today with the creation of cloud computing, 5G networks, and faster mobile computers, the revolution to bring better 3D titles to your hands has become overwhelmingly apparent to game developers.

The Cocos engine started as a 2D game engine. In Cocos2d-x, we built the best open-source 2D engine in the world. We also tried to build 3D features upon the 2D-oriented architecture. But due to the lack of an editor and the challenge of growth on 3D features, it wasn’t very successful. That’s why we were determined to build an excellent editor tool: Cocos Creator. It was initially for 2D game development. But since 2017, we have already started to build a pure 3D engine for this tool. To push ourselves to give developers the best 3D development tool, we have re-designed the whole engine architecture and updated the editor’s core. On October 15th, 2019, we released Cocos Creator 3D, a dedicated experimental branch of China’s product. With a whole year’s effort, we have greatly improved the 3D engine architecture. We are finally merging the experimental 3D branch into the main Cocos Creator product to forge the awesome Cocos Creator 3.0, released later this year.

You can download Cocos Creator 3.0 preview for Windows and Mac now. Do be aware however there are a few caveats, especially for existing Cocos Creator developers:

  1. Projects built in Cocos Creator 1.X – 2.X will not work with this demo.
  2. Only 3D projects are available in this demo. Some 2D features like Spine, Tiled map, etc. are absent in this demo, but they will be included in the official 3.0 version.
  3. All projects built in the demo are exportable to 3.0 when it is released. So go crazy!
  4. We only recommend using TypeScript for future Cocos Creator 3.0 projects.

If you are interested in learning about Cocos Creator in general we have a tutorial series available on DevGa.me. You can see the new Cocos Creator 3.0 tech preview in action in the video below. A good place to start is the Cocos examples project available on GitHub. If you want to test Cocos Creator 3.0 using the same model as in the video, that model is available for free here on Sketchfab.