Main Features

• Clean engine architecture
  • Makes it easy to make your own game using the engine.
  • Messaging system allows you to communicate between systems and other entities without coupling your code in ways you wouldn't want to.
  • Entity/Component system allows you to make your own objects and customize them very easily.
• Terrain engine
  • Quad-tree culling
  • Multi-texture splatting
  • Smoothing and scaling
• Physics engine integration
  • Uses JibLibX for physics
  • Implementation of Phantom Physics, allows for triggering of actions based on entering/exiting a volume.
  • Also implemented triggering of actions on and off contact with an entity.
• Input and Camera systems ready to go
  • Three camera types already implements
  • Setting up input in your game is very easy.
• Graphics system very easy to use
  • Allows you to create your own materials.
  • Easy to create shaders and have them properly receive the input values they need.

Huge amount of changes since v0.196

The entire Message system, Entity/Component system, and Physics interface was revamped. So much has changed I won't have room for all of the details on this page, so I'll give a brief outline, and in the engine download you'll find 'changelog.txt' if you care to read further.

Summary of main changes

• 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.
    • 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 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. 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)
  • Fog is back, is more efficient, and is now thicker at lower elevations (optionally).
• Skydomes are back, missing since v0.182b. More efficient as well.
• Terrain updates
  • Faster index buffer creation
  • Terrain creation is slightly optimized
  • Normal mapped terrain is working again
  • Added ability to draw the quad-tree bounding boxes
  • Terrain heightfields are no longer flipped along x, z
• Bug fixes
  • Fixed memory leaks in the messaging system and shutdown methods.
  • Fixed freezing issue that occured due to multi-threading.
  • Fixed bugs in the free camera causing erratic movement in some cases.
• General code cleanup

Xbox 360 users.

I am currently the only developer on this engine, and I do not have the membership subscription to be able to test XNA on my Xbox 360. So I have no way to verify this version of the engine still runs, or runs well on on the Xbox 360. I also had to make some changes to some of JibLibX's Xbox 360 files as they were not compiling. It appears that the latest patch version of the engine may not be converted for the 360 yet, while I'm sure JigLibX 0.3.1b has been.