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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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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.