Skyline Game Engine

Hello Thank you for the Comments and i will try to respond with the best information we can provide.

Skyline is in Beta and this means that not all features are in place or there may be bugs and crashes that may occur when working. With saying this though, i believe skyline has a lot of talent and a great possible future. Anyway onto the questions:

1) This is a strange one to answer considering all the engines are different in what they do and who they are provided to. But we would say that we work very well depending on what you are doing. Skyline offers pro features but is aimed at the hobbyist or indie market and designed without a steep learning curve.

2) Skyline is being developed to be as simple as possible in use but with a powerful result and also we wish the engine to be accessible by the artists. When designing features, we wish things to be done within a few mouse clicks or button presses. We attempt to automate what we can to save you time. We also have a cool asset manager and resource system. No need to have duplicate assets per game as one library can be shared across all games.

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3) There is a near complete physics library which supports everything you mentioned apart from hair and cloth. We have already made things like planes, vehicles, boats, characters, triggerboxs, full collisions each way and also have sensor sweeps all which are accessible to AI if programmed. We also have a ragdoll feature in dev but it requires a few tweaks before releasing it.

4) Skyline can import almost any art format. We mainly use FBX for our main model import routine and it is generally quite accurate with results. We have full support of rigging and animations with Bipeds and IK rigs.

Skyline's asset manager is capable of handling mesh conversion and import all for you. Our materials are single files and can be shared across many meshes. We also support multi materials on meshes and can assign any material to any mesh with ability to overwrite the base mesh data. Full freedom is what we aim for. When you prepare assets for skyline, materials are generated automatically with high quality shaders and apply the normal and specular maps if found in the same location.

5) Skyline is designed to be genre agnostic, but this includes full open world gameplay. We can handle large terrains up to 16km without paging lol :P We have also been planning on upgrading this area and are going to be implementing a paging solution for the terrain and assets for even bigger or unlimited worlds.

For the vegetation, we currently support static batching with transitional impostors for large forest rendering. However, we are redesigning the entire vegetation system as it does have the odd issue to be honest, but our new system will rival all others :) For the grass we use billboards and they have many features including wind.

As for the performance of openworld, currently is is just frustum and LOD stages, but we do have plans for adding dynamic lodding and full occlusion culling. Plus there is lots more to add that we have planned.

6) For audio, we support .ogg and .wav, we prefer to use the .ogg though as it has good compression and keeps quality. Sadly we cannot use .mp3 due to licensing problems and if supported by users, then we can look into adding .flac

7) Yes, we do use DX9, but it is still pushing some good quality visuals and gives great backwards compatibility. Saying this though does not mean we are not developing DX11, it will take a bit more time though. A very cool thing that we can tell you today is that skyline is now 64bit enabled as of today as i just got the compilation working for it :D :D :D

8) Visual scripting (what we call visual mechanics editor) will be available in the next release of skyline, just a few extra bits are being sorted atm. The modules (code blocks) that you or anyone else needs can be added when requested and released in a automatic patch update.

9) hehe, yes this is the true price of the engine. We aim for affordable licensing to everyone. You only pay another £20 after your updates run out. The £20 provides you with another year of updates.
Your first year of updates only starts when we exit BETA, so all updates are free atm.

There are no extra costs or charges that we incur, but we do have the odd library integrated that does need payed for if you exceed their license restrictions. However, we will always try to offer a seperate non limited source library beside it to not add any more pain lol :P

10) Wherever possible we have placed an automatic upgrade system to make your life easier when developing.
<ul>
<li> Scene Files: When opening a scene on a new version of skyline, it will auto upgrade everything to match the new version. A Backup file is saved in the same place in case of errors.
<li> Preset Files: Like the scene files, these will upgrade when dragged into the scene or managed from the asset manager.
<li> Skyline Installation: To make the process of upgrading painless, we have an auto update system which offers you the update and when proceeding, will download and patch your current installation. When done, skyline will reboot and you can keep on working. Patch updates can be between 15mb > 300mb+
</ul>

11) We use a propriety archive format(*.pak) designed only to work inside skylines end game or editor. These files are as secure as any other game or engines assets.
There is second archive(*.ark) that is used only for in editor use and wont load into a compiled game, this is useful for selling assets that you do not wish to provide raw files with or simply for sample assets.
Games are exported easily using our wizard system, it is capable of setting loading screens and choosing levels to export the game and choosing which levels are the default. It offers multiple release versions including Stand alone games(Everything in one place) or Player based games, which is great for small games or sample levels as it keeps file size down. Other features include setting icon for exe's and future versions will even compile an installer of the game for you.

I hope this all makes sense to you and helps in your decision making process :D

2) Yes, this will be mostly true. We will have a c++ SDK at some point but it does not have the backing of the userbase as most of our users are hobbyists.

3) Well, we use physX as our main physics library and we are trying to add as many features as possible to save users the time on creating the parts everyone has to do everytime a game is made lol :P There are still a couple of parts to add in though.

4) Accepted formats that we use as our main ones are: .fbx, .dae, .x, .lwo, .obj, there are also many more as we have included the open source library Assimp and most of the formats work in one respect or another.

9) Thanks, i will go through the sites ammending the information for the updates to be more clear :)

10) We tend to release a changelog for every version, but not normally for the assets. Plus the scene files when upgraded generally don't need to show anything as it hasn't failed us yet lol :P But again, i can look at possibly building a system to notify you of the changes in your scene that were changed.

Thank you for the kind works, it really gives us motivation when other people show their great opinions of our engine. We look forward to you joining our community as we like to keep it friendly and creative.

til then :D

p.s. Here is some links:

roadmap: Trello.com
main site: Home.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk
Forum: Forum.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk

Physics) Can you describe a little bit more with what sort of "edits to templates" or "creating your own" you mean as i am not entirely sure what you are after :)

Whatever you are after though, we can work it into the engine so you can use it if the task is doable and reasonable as we do listen to our users feature requests.

Thank you for your support ;)

SplashScreen) Yes, the end game has a basic splash screen for the compiled game, but you can change this if you want.
We are planning for more splashscreens that use the video technique instead of a GUI.

If there is anything you need, then please post to the forums or email support(at)aurasoft-skyline(dot)co(dot)uk and enjoy skyline.

Any physics can be tweaked. For example you used water. This is all controllable through script. To make a water volume, you would need to add a triggerbox to the scene to detect colliding physics shapes. After you would apply the forces, restition etc.. that you want for watert, slime space ;) We have an extensive set of physics functions designed especially for what you want.

To store this volume you made for later usage, you simply save it in our .preset format which is a saved off entity in the scene and holds all the dynamic content like scripts and actions. Then drag this in as many times as you want or as many scenes as you want :)

The video splash screens will be supported soon, but for now we have a loading screen as a GUI as the game boots.
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Well i hope this helps :D