Getting up to Speed with all new good things and Game-Dev Docs news

These past month had been fully in the name of performance improvements, feature adding and especially documentation. I don't go into much text here since the documentation part is where the big huge text is located for those interested in both the inner engine workings and especially how to developer with this game engine. This produced lots of documentation especially for the DragonScript language in form of API documentation and Wiki documentation. Now included is also the first demo application for the new features. More will follow to get you started with the game engine. But from the technical point of view what ate the majority of time had been a tremendous performance improvement workover that touched many engine areas. Various performance improvements including Parallel Processing and an advanced OpenGL render thread system consumed more time than expected but the result is a total performance boost of up to 150% over nominal this spring. There is still some room left especially in foreign code not that much under my control. And if this would be not enough already the Drag[en]gine has now also a whole new Canvas System. So before the Links to all the information a little view across some of the parts touched during the past time.

Speed optimizations

• Optimized Bullet Physics calculations (certain Bullet collision tests are slow and inaccurate).
• Optimized matrix and quaternion calculations for CPU code.
• Animation pre-calculation for animation resources (pre-canned animation data).
• Post physics collision test to colliders improving performance and simplify typical test scenarios.
• Parallel processing implementation.
• Animator calculation performance boosted with parallel processing.
• Multi-Threaded Rendering in OpenGL module with optimal synching. No restriction on what game scripts are allowed to change ( 100% autonomous render thread ).

• Collision filtering with filter and category layer masks (64-bit each).
• 2D Render System with improved video playback and canvas capturing.
• Bullet supports now collider rotate hits and collider move rotate hits natively.
• Engine module version support to launchers allowing for multiple module versions to be installed at the same time and barring certain versions for certain games.
• Improving animator editor usage (rule icons, group rule support and cut/copy/paste in more places)
• Collider attachments support now all kinds of resources.
• Smooth value support especially for script use with natural smoothing behavior with unpredictable values.
• Barrier and proper sempahore implementation.

• Improved GUI Themes with canvas creators, XML loading, customizeable widget designers and much more for full freedom in GUI/2D building.
• Optimizing scripts for performance where suitable.
• Scene element initialization improved for better and more powerful game entity creation with less code.
• Native locomotion class with different movement types (natural, fps, vehicle), body tilt support and automatic management of game entity resource (performance and usability improvements).
• DoxyGen filter to process DragonScript files (document your game scripts automatically).
• DragonScript Language API documentation (Language Level API Classes).
• DragonScript Script API documentation (Game engine module level Script API).
• DragonScript 2D Canvas and GUI test project.
• Various code samples for the added wiki articles.

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As you noticed there is no big content update. Since I had been all occupied with all the tech and documentation and I still have no helping hand except myself I could not also deal with content. So if you are from the artistic domain and you want to do something else than what is usually around you are welcome to step forward. No portfolio fillers. I had enough bad experiences with those.

So happy game-deving until the next time.