I did spend some time doing a rework of the page describing the game engine i write for this game project. I tried to make it more clear and informative to people why this engine is different than the rest and a true Next Generation Game Engine in contrast to others. The informations can be found on the Drag(en)gine Page. Later on I will split the page up into an engine description part and a modules part giving more room for the feature list, which i do not want to make public available completly yet (you will see why later).
The second change that is notable, and that is the most interesting for modders or people interested in using this game engine later on for their own projects is the inclusion of XML into various parts of the engine. XML is a language designed to describe data on a text-basis. This makes editing game content very easy you can edit those files with any text editor or use special XML editors with syntax hilighting. Currently the following files are written in XML.
Module Definition Files
They define what modules are available to the engine and contains additional data allowing to check modules for functionality and locating problems easily. Other game engines simpy have a plugin like system that gives nearly no clue about what needs modules have and in case of failure locating the reason is especially for a player not trained in programming a horror. the MDF system of the Dragengine prevents this problem. Have a look at the OpenGL Module Definition as an example.
Dragengine Skin Files
The Dragengine uses a special skin file based on XML to describe skins in a very flexible way. Skins are defined using a tree technic. You can define all kinds of animation effects using this skin file with nothing else than a text-editor. The skin format also provides special combining effects to make creating slightly varied skins possible without altering image-files outside the engine. Have a look at the Computer Skin or a sample rewrite of the Center Console Skin from Quake3 as dragengine skin file.
Dragengine Map File
Maps are also described using XML which allows easy addition of new map-elements which other game engines are simply not capable of without altering their binary-files and all applications bound to use it. The exact XML syntax is not fully defined yet for the map hence there is not yet a screenshot of how it looks like. Once the first version is fully defined I will add a screenshot.
Other files like Models or Animations also have besides the binary-format an XML counterpart, which is very usefull for building a game as you can quickly alter the files to check out if a change works ingame and use binary-files for less file-size later on. I do not include screenshots of those files as they look similar to the mentioned ones and are usually generated using the Blender Python scripts attached to the game engine.
This has now been a rather technical news post and the next time will be more for those not that much interested in modding an engine but playing a game. Until then, drive safe *grin*
![Drag[en]gine](https://media.indiedb.com/cache/images/engines/1/1/9/crop_120x90/banner_large.png)
there is an error in the screenshot of the quak3-center-con skin XML. who finds it? ;)
frquency instead of frequency?
Your module system seems very interesting. I'm curious about which map format you are using.
hehe, not that one but it's an error too. i referred to the line
<shift u="0" v="-0.2"/>
<image src="text.png">
that's incorrect XML syntax and should be
<shift u="0" v="-0.2">
<image src="text.png">
</shift>
i'll add a small map-format excert once i have updated my map editor with the new skin format. maps use Entities and Terrain Patches. possible additions are Brushes and Math Geometry. those are not for sure yet though.