Drag[en]gine Game Engine Release 1.6 news

If you have installed the Drag[en]gine and/or IGDE using repositories or market place updates arrive automatically. Otherwise get the 1.6 release files from the Download Section. You can install it over the 1.5 release but it is recommended to uninstalling 1.5 first to keep the game engine directory clean.

The scope of this release changed due to the game project needing improved animations. Instead of creating them in Blender (which is slow for me) I've opted to go the Motion Capture way. This required VR support in Drag[en]gine. Hence the major work went into adding a VR System and the DEMoCap tool to use it to do Motion Capture using VR equipment.

The Drag[en]gine received a new Module Type VR. Module of VR type have the responsibility to query positioning and input data from VR equipment and to forward rendered images from the Graphic Module to the HMD. Input data like pressing buttons or pulling a trigger is handed to the game scripts like regular input data and thus can be used out of the box with existing input handling. Position data is queried separately without using the input event system since this has to be done every frame update.

Added also Behaviors to provide VR support to actors. BaseVRActor and BAAFirstPersonVR are a ready to use base classes to start using VR.

Added OpenVR VR Module as initial module. By default this taps into SteamVR but can tap also into other OpenVR environments if present. The video below is a capture from the ExampleVR example application present in the DEExamples repository.

Under Linux you have to start SteamVR before launching the game engine due to a limitation in SteamVR not supporting automatically starting the runtime as it is done under Windows.

Under Windows you might run into a segfault due to a bug in Steam . If you run into this issue please add to the above linked issue to raise its importance.

All this had been done to start creating the DEMoCap tool. This tool allows to do Motion Capture using the Drag[en]gine game engine and VR equipment. The result is saved as *.deanim files which can be either used directly in Drag[en]gine projects or imported into Blender using the Drag[en]gine Blender Scripts. Once imported into Blender you can use them for whatever projects you want.

Right now the repository is private since it has no UI yet with the characters set up using XML file. Once a UI is present the repository is switched to public mode. The videos below show the result of two capture sessions with different types of characters without any post-processing done yet:

This had been though not the only work done. See the full Changelog of the latest release on this Perma-Link: Changelog Latest Release

If you find bugs or missing features please Please report them on GitHub or at the Developer Forum.

If you have questions, suggestions or other inquiries you can PM me here or stop by the Discord Channel.