Xenko 1.8 Released

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Xenko, previously known as Paradox Engine, just released version 1.8 of their C# powered cross platform 2D/3D game engine.  If you want to learn more about the Xenko game engine, I previously featured it in the Closer Look series, as well as this tutorial series. 

 

Perhaps the biggest new feature of this release is a new UI Editor.

UIXenko

This new editor enables WYSIWYG UI editing directly in the editor and comes with several controls and gives you the ability to edit properties such as color, layout, etc.

 

The UI editor isn’t the only new feature of this release.  Other features include:

  • multithreaded rendering and Vulkan support
  • addition of Prefab Model, an optimized model with baked textures and merged geometry reducing required draw calls
  • SSAO rendering – Scalable Ambient Obscurance
  • Cel shading rendering model, enable “toon””

 

There are also several fixes and changes from the release notes:

     
    Enhancements
    General
    • Added a DebugConsoleSystem to be able to print basic debug information in game.
    • Added Utility methods FindChild and FindRoot to Entity.
    • Animation blend trees can now be created in script. The AnimationBlend pre-built script shows how to do it easily
    • Updated Roslyn to 1.3.2
    Assets
    • Yaml scene files now encode entity and component references in a much more compact way
    • Yaml serialization order is now following class declaration order
    Audio
    • Game studio side: added hard limits in Compression ratio, also now it is using a slider.
    • Added SetRange in SoundInstance to be able to set play range, it also enables seeking.
    • Added Position property in SoundInstance to be able to know the position in time of your playing instance.
    • Added PlayAndForget to AudioEmitterSoundController to play many instances of the same sound rapidly.
    • Added RequestedAudioDevice in AudioSystem to allow game code to select audio devices (Windows only for now).
    • AudioEmitterComponent now contains a dictionary of sounds that can be used from the emitter, those can be set from the Game Studio directly!
    • Game Studio sound preview now uses the internal engine, this means that you can directly preview the compression rate!
    Graphics
    • CommandList can now compiled and executed
    • Constant Buffers are now uploaded in a single GPU Buffer and set with offsets on platform/API that support this mode
    • D3D12: reduced number of API calls
    Game Studio
    • About Page accessible from Menu–>Help–>About.
    Input
    • Added preliminary controller vibration support with Input.SetGamePadVibration
    Particles
    • Particle rendering now uses the improved multithreaded pipeline, significantly speeding up the vertex buffer building.
    Samples
    • Several samples have been removed. Particles and Physics samples have been greatly reduced and merged into only two, which allows the user to check more features with a single sample.
    Issues fixed
    Physics
    • Procedural models can now be used as a source to generate convex hull shapes.
    • We are now using the github version of Bullet Physics and actively cooperating with the project.
    • Fixed ColliderShape cached matrices computation.
    Game Studio
    • Credential dialog will now save the credential settings when closing.
    • Credential dialog will not appear if you checked “Do not ask again”.
    • Fixed hang when launching a Linux game remotely.
    Breaking changes
    UI
    • The UIComponent expect a UI Page in place of the previous Root Element property.
    • Most dependency properties were changed into regular C# properties, except the ones that are attached properties (such as the Column and Row attached property of a Grid).
    • In desktop, TouchMove event is also raised when no mouse button are pressed.
    • Default style of the UI has been removed.
    Audio
    • Removed Play with boolean argument from SoundInstance, instead the same behavior will be achieved by using PlayExtended or Play.
    • Renamed IsLooped into IsLooping.
    • Deprecated: GetSoundController, AttachSound, AttachSounds, DetachSound, DetachSounds. Please add sounds now from the AudioEmitterComponent
    Physics
    • Collision.Contacts is now an HashSet so access by index is not possible anymore, please use foreach or iterate them instead.
    VR
    • Added audio, status and re-center support for Oculus Rift.

    Known Issues

    • On Linux, when switching the underlying Graphics Platform, rendering will not occur. Delete the cache, local and roaming folder on the Linux host and restarting the game should fix the issue.
    • Linux Mono has some issue with the new effect compiler (since 1.7.5-Beta). Please use the “remote compiler” in the “package properties” (right-click on the package in solution explorer), or use Linux CoreCLR in the meantime.

 

Xenko is available as a free download here.

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