A long time passed since the last update since a lot of engine work has been done ( The informations here are a bit shortened so see the Links for details ).
- New Server / Homepage: Today the new server went up and with it the Drag[en]gine receives it's own Project Page. The link will be announced as soon as the page is ready for the public.
- Progressive Optimization ( Infos-1, Infos-2 ): Game engines tend to precalculate game worlds prior to running a game which works well with very static game worlds but fails quickly on very dynamic ones. The Drag[en]gine ventures down a different road by using progressive optimization. Object changing a lot stay rather unoptimized. If settling down for some time they are progressively optimized in the background to gain speed.
- Transparent Shadow Casting ( Infos-1, Infos-2 ): Transparent shadows are very common in the real life like an empty bottle on a table. The shadow cast on the table is not black but tinted green. The new rework in the engine provides realistic transparent shadow casting at good speeds.
- Other Updates: The World Editor received a couple of cleanups and improvements like the Object Linking System. Linking informations provides a way to recognize connections between objects. Instead of a huge mess of all possible links the editor shows you only the links of the Active Object to easily view links and follow link chains. Auto-Updating is now implemented so you can test objects changing over time.
A lot of work vent into improving the frame rate. The engine performs now at speeds between 20 and 60 FPS depending on geometry count. More speed to be expected soon. Stay tuned for more.
![Drag[en]gine](https://media.indiedb.com/cache/images/engines/1/1/9/crop_120x90/banner_large.png)
Looks like its time to make good little demo level (if lighning not ready - just make geometry & texturing) . Now screens looks REALY simple, some blocky buildings and simple textured terrainl. You make good programmers part, but to show it - you neeed some artistic screens. And dragon texture :).
How about lightning priview in world editor (like UnrealED or Sandbox)? Its realy improves lighning and designing process :).
Great lighting effects and programming.
Really well done.
i want it...now :D
@Uragan_lex:
A techdemo video is in planing but the biggest problem is to get the quality done from the artist point. Unfortunately I'm lacking any additional help then myself right now so I don't know how good I can make this. What goes for the dragon he's meant to be white although the skin is not finished yet, that's true. What goes for the World Editor it is sandbox style so enabling the lighting mode switches on full lighting with shadows and all. The shadow shots are made with the World Editor. For the optimizer shots I simply disabled lighting so you can see better what happens in the background.
>>Unfortunately I'm lacking any additional help then myself right now so I don't know how good I can make this.
For now i cant help myself :gigi: , but i keep it in mind.
Its good that world editor is realtime - i realy need this feature in hammer :D
Well it depends on what you call "realtime". If you mean that the game is running in the the background and that it's like being in the game then this is not the case. The world editor uses the game engine to render as well as doing physics. The game logic though is not running. This is because the world editor can be used for all sorts of games based on this engine and the logic is game specific. You don't know even in what language the game is written ( hence what scripting Module is used ) so getting the game logic into the world editor would be a nearly impossible task if it has to stay generic enough. This is why I decided to split things up. The world editor is generic enough to work with all games but you don't get all the game logic ( some you do ). If you want all game logic you need to run the editor from inside the game.
Do yo have any plans about making a non-linear editing system like Matinee for Unreal? It would be very interesting to have a video editor to animate things inside of your Draggine, plus it would make it usable for machinima making, which I am highly interested in.
As I understand it you have plotted out everything about the engine long before writing the first line of code, so I'm just wondering if you have made plans for a video editor, too.
Your engine looks better with every update and the amount of detail thinking you put into it astonishes me (e.g. the transparent shadows). This is a totally different engine from - lets say GenesisDevice (http://www.genesisdevice.net/media.html), but I cherish your development a lot, because of the artistic freedom it gives to developers. This simply doesn't look like anything I have ever seen before!
Great work, keep it up and cry for help if you need models or textures. EVERYBODY will donate models and skins for this project, I'm pretty sure about that.
@SinKing:
I don't know Matinee for Unreal. Is this to simply play videos inside the engine? Wha goes for this yes it is planned. In fact you can realize this in multiple ways. The preferred way is using your script language of choice. The engine is written to be able to handle multiple World objects at the same time. Hence you can use your scripts to animate one World object using a movie script while using the result in your main World object. The possibilities are only limited by your hardware.
I have though another plan which should be interesting for Machinima lovers. This little gem will also drive my Tech-Demo once I have it done. This game engine is only a library without it's own executable. This job of launching a game using the engine is done using a "Launcher" which is the only executable linking against the game engine ( hence your game does not link against it leaving you free to use any license you see fit ). The World Editor is one such launcher using the engine for rendering. As you might already guess the idea is to make a special launcher which I'll call DEMoviePlayer. This launcher takes a movie script and plays it using the game engine. For this I'll write an own editor geared towards editing such movie files. The Tech-Demo as well as any Machinima is then just a movie script played with DEMoviePlayer. I consider this the best solution for all involved.
What goes for the other engine my one still has a lot of work to be done before coming close but I'm working on it.
thanks man, seems to be a great editor.
I just realised you are German, too, so "Guten Morgen"!