About the Next Release

Seeing that the last site update is a little over one month it is about time that I wrote a bit about what's happening. The current update is taking a fair amount of my time to ready but it most certainly is for the best.

Shader Tree

Finally, shader trees can now be edited again. The transition from nEdit (using wxWidgets) to gsEdit (using Qt) left me with a lot of features to rewrite and among them was the shader tree editor. Unfortunately, having the shader tree editor back also requires that the geometry and material editors UI be reorganized and this is a very time consuming task.

Renderer Performance

The default desktop OpenGL renderer performances have been vastly improved and on low to mid-class graphic cards the FPS increased from 150% to 200%. High-end graphic card users won't see much performance improvements on all but the most geometry intensive scenes.

As a result of these improvements, the Mediecross mini-game can now be played (~25fps) on lower settings on a Ion netbook with full deferred shading and high dynamic range enabled inside the editor while the current version barely reaches 15fps under the same condition.

Portability

On the engine side, a lot of work happened in the source tree to further ease porting to new platforms. A few adjustments were made to switch the engine to a multiple core approach. This will be done in several steps starting with the parallel execution of the engine main components (scene graph, physics, audio, input). Early tests are already showing a significant improvement on the heaviest physics samples.

While I cannot say much more right now, the work on source portability is obviously not done without a reason ;).