It finally happens: After about 8 months of hard work I can finally present you the newest and finest release of the Neo3D Game Engine yet!
There also is another reason for joy. Neo 0.1 was released on July the 23rd 2014, that means Neo is turning one year old! While Neo 0.1 was a mere fork of the Maratis Game Engine (www.maratis3d.org) with some minor changes that I wanted to make, 0.5 is growing more into its own space with its own goals. While Marati
The Neo version 0.5 is the biggest milestone yet with 463 commits since the last v0.4 commit at the time of writing this.
Improvements include introduction of unit tests, a new 2D rendering system, a vastly improved Lua API, various bug fixes and performance
improvements. Some of the features are still quite experimental and disabled by default like the Mono plugin that allows using C# for writing game plugins.
This beta version implies that no new fe...
First of all: Happy new year to all!
This is the first news entry in a long time. There was development going on but nothing that was really showable. Many things happened under the hood without the regular user even noticing it. Despite of that I felt it was time to show some of those things anyways.
One of the biggest things that changed was the refactoring work done inside the engine. All classes were renamed and moved into the the namespace "Neo"
What is a game without a good UI?
Let it be a simple menu for configuring the graphics or a sophisticated UI for managing resources in a RTS game.
The GUI is always a very important part of the gaming experience. Neo did not have anything to achieve even the simplest in-game menu without hacking around with scene layers and material animations. That is the reason why I finally decided to start a new subproject:
NeoGui.
NeoGui is basically a library t...
Neo has had some profiling support in the past but only to the extend of measuring basic frame times.
One of the new features for Neo 0.5 is the support for more advanced CPU profiling!
You can easily spot which parts of your game have to be optimized. The current implementation is only an initial prototype but will evolve into a useful tool as features are added. The code is online in the GitHub repository but a daily build still has to be created.
...
Finally! The biggest Neo release yet is finally there!
There are huge changes, both in the editor and in the engine.
The Neo Editor
The Neo Editor got a completely new toolbar for easier navigation. There now is scriptable input method support i.e. the possibility to script any control scheme you want. You could for example mimic the way Unity3D or Torque3D works. In this release there already is a Maratis scheme implemented. Use Neo the w
One thing that was missing in the Neo Editor is support for localization. This is now over!
Now it is possible to load preconfigured language descriptions to let Neo speak your language!
Currently there is only an English and a German translation included.
Those are the only languages I speak. If you happen to speak French, Italian or Spanish please consider translating the program to your language. Every contribution is very appreciated!
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In the most current daily build you have the possibility to directly send a crash report in the case of Neo crashing. The report resembles an e-mail that gets sent to a mail address on this server so that this data is not publicly visible.
The dialog will automatically pop up as soon as a crash is detected. No need to do anything!
Please send a crash report if you experience a crash. Only this way we can fix your problems!
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I finally got around to port the post effects plugin into the core engine. That means you are now able to use GLSL post effects shader to improve the visual fidelity of your game!
Scene layers and particle systems work without any problem. Skyboxes need some more testing as well as post effects performance. There are still some optimizations that could be made.
You can simply enable/disable post effects in your Lua script:
-- enablePostEffects(ver...
