It has been 9 months since a release, and over a year since any news of the engine was posted here on the forums, so I thought it might be worth a post. :)

Visit the QuickStart Engine site if you're interested.


Here is the summary of the changes since v0.196:

• Updated Engine to use XNA 3.1
• Updated physics engine to JibLibX 0.3.1 + newest patch (June 20th, 2009)
• Lots of work on physics integration with the engine
  • No longer officially supporting NVidia PhysX, they're no longer supporting free use of their engine. Will likely be removing it from future version of engine.
  • Bug fix for physics box shapes physics being larger than their render mesh, making them seem to collide too soon with other physics.
  • Ability support for setting/getting linear velocity, and angular velocity of entities.
  • Bug fix for issues that would occur when setting position or rotation of entities, setting these will no longer cause the entity to lose velocity.
  • Debug display of physics meshes, allows you to see your physics shapes (especially nice for invisible physics volumes).
• Other new physics features
  • Added phantom physics component with support for collision detection and message triggers on enter/exit of phantom volumes.
  • Added collision effects that can affect other entities when they collide with an entity emitting a collision effect.
• Major work on the Messaging System
  • Ability to send messages to any Entity in any scene based on the Entity's Unique ID.
  • This change altered the overall look of the engine, and allowed us to decouple things that should not have been coupled in code.
  • Ability to send messages directly to Interfaces and the Scene Manager.
  • Added about 25 new messages.
  • Exceptions will now fire if messages are created or sent improperly, which fixes bug leaks associated with Messages we were sending improperly.
• Rendering updates
  • Ability to sort rendering into three groups (first, normal, last)
  • A couple new simple shaders for simple objects.
  • Fog is back in the engine, is more efficient, and is now thicker at lower elevations (optionally).
• Skydomes are finally back, missing since v0.182b. More efficient with render ordering.
• Terrain updates
  • Index buffer creation is now about 10% faster.
  • Overall terrain creation is slightly optimized
  • Normal mapped terrain is working again
  • Added ability to draw the quad-tree bounding boxes (by pressing 'D')
  • Terrain heightfields are no longer flipped along x, z from the images they're created from.
• Bug fixes
  • Fixed memory leaks in the messaging system.
  • Fixed freezing issue that occured due to multi-threading with physics.
  • Fixed memory leaks that would occur when shutting down the engine.
  • Fixed bug that would cause the free camera to slow down at extremely high framerates.
  • Fixed bug that would cause the free camera to move upward if it was facing upward.
• General cleanup
  • All physics related code that was in BaseEntity and the Scene Manager has been moved to the new Physics Interface and the Physics Component.
  • Made some abstract functions in BaseEntity and BaseComponent virtual instead, which prevents repetitive code in each.
  • All kinds of misc cleanup in many files.

I looked at your previous release and it had a lot of potential. Keep up the good work.

nikescar:

I looked at your previous release and it had a lot of potential. Keep up the good work.

Thank you, I try to get some work done on it whenever I'm not working 50-60 hours a week at my job.

For the next release I'm hoping for:
- Skinned animations
- Character component and character controls
- Water, including depth-based shader effect
- Shadow mapping
- Easier way to create custom triggered events.

sweet and we are just on a look out for a physics engine!


Thanks!

The shadowing would help me out a bunch. I look forward to that release.

Mihalych:

sweet and we are just on a look out for a physics engine!


Thanks!

Well the Physics Engine itself is JibLibX, which you could put into any XNA game. Having a game engine wrapped around a physics engine can make things a little easier (or harder I guess) depending on the engine.

I was hoping some day to incorporate Havok physics for the Windows version of the engine, but Havok requires a registration to even use it, and it isn't free to use if you want to ever sell your game.

nikescar:

The shadowing would help me out a bunch. I look forward to that release.

I've put off a lot of the graphical features for quite awhile because I'm not really a graphics programmer. But shadows really help with depth perception in a 3D environment, so I figure I should just get it out of the way.