Limon Engine - v0.6

Featurette for 0.6:

Main goal of 0.6 release was supporting shooters. There is also a tech demo focuses on FPS genre as release theme, it also has a video:

Whats New

Biggest change is new ways to customize Limon Engine. 2 new customisation points are exposed. Also a project is ready within the release to start coding customisations.

Player Extensions

Player extensions get input of the player, and also charged with handling player interaction calls. It is the main driver of FPS genre implementation. There are 2 sample implementations within the release. One is used on sample map, and the other is used on tech demo.

AI Actors

AI actors "plays" each frame, by generic information like player distance etc. If Actor needs more compute intensive information (Namely path finding) it can ask for it to engine. This extension mainly used for enemy behaviour, but it can also be used to implement scripted scenes, followers or NPCs. 2 samples are included in the release.

Old extension point of Trigger Actions are also available.

World Representation Improvements

Not objects can have other objects attached to them, or multiple objects can be grouped together. This makes editor easier to use, but more importantly it allows more dynamic game worlds, like bullet holes, muzzle flashes etc to be rendered as part of other objects. This change also includes attachment to bones of animated objects, so same enemy models can be used with different guns or other ornaments. This change is also reflected on editor, now editor has a tree view of current elements of the world, instead of a list.

Render Pipeline Changes and Post Processing Effects

Limon Engine now has a more complex render pipeline to allow post processing effects. SSAO is implemented as first effect, more are planned. This change resulted in decreased FPS , but it is necessary to support more modern effects.

Other Noteworthy Changes

*. Assets are now auto discovered, and shown in directory trees for ease of use.
*. GUI elements use gizmos like 3D objects to steamline the GUI creation.
*. GUI elements can be animated just like 3D objects. Their animations also manage Alpha changes.
*. Mixamo.com animations are supported. They are discovered and added to models on launch.
*. Embedded textures are supported.
*. Models can be converted to internal format for release.

If GitHub download is slow, you can use the following links:

Windows build:

https://www.indiedb.com/engines/limon-engine/downloads/limonengine-06-windows

Tech demo:

https://www.indiedb.com/engines/limon-engine/downloads/limon-tech-demo-06

Editor Key change

The editor key changed from " to F2, which has better international compatibility.

Thanks to @gamefromscratch for bringing the issue up.

Limon Engine - v0.5.1

This is a maintanence release that fixes issues with MacOS and Linux (Arch Linux) issues. No functional improvements.

Limon Engine - v0.5

Video of the released version:

Sound Subsystem

Sound subsystem is implemented using OpenAL as backend. You can attach sound to models and animations. Both are processed by position of the attachment. You can also add music to maps, and play sounds as if they are playing at the player position. It is used to play pick up sounds etc. Also you can set step on sound per model.

GUI Toolkit

With this release you can create GUIs with text, image and button elements. Buttons can be used to trigger actions. They have optional images as hover, click and disabled.

Animations

It is possible to create animations in the editor. There is a sequencer when create new animation is choosed. Animations can be looped. Animated objects are automatically coverted to kinematic, and when animation ends old flags are automatically returned.

Performance

Instanced rendering implemented, which increased worst case performance %500.
Non existing lights were still calculated in shaders, it is fixed, with around %30 percent performance increase on low light count maps.

Minor

• The options are now read from xml file. You can change resolution, shadow quality etc using the file ./Data/Options.xml
• There is a variable store to use with triggers, if a variable is queried before setting it, it will be auto set to 0 and returned.
• Actions can be set to run after load finishes
• Start using collision filters for physics.

Please note this release breaks API, you will need to update custom triggers.

First Release

This is the first release of the Limon Engine. It has the test map, and you can test the engine and editor as you wish. If you find any issues please let me know.

LimonEngine-0.4.tar.gz is the linux build
LimonEngine-0.4.zip is the Windows build
LimonEngine-0.4-mac.zip is the Mac build