[Sponk]

Well, writing a custom memory allocator that is more efficient than the default one is very difficult. Object data is not frequently created or destroyed in the engine itself and Lua would not use the pool anyway, rendering the new allocator nearly useless. In addition has to be said that this memory allocator would not be cross platform, meaning that there would be one for Mac/Linux, Windows, Android, Emscripten etc. which is unmaintainable for me.

Do you really have your bottleneck at allocating memory?

The biggest performance improvement is probably found in the multi threading mechanism. There has to be much more happening parallel which currently is blocked by the absence of a working IPC mechanism like messaging. Another thing is moving all visibility testing to the GPU using OpenCL on platforms supporting it. Here again: How much is there to gain? Is it worth the time to develop and test it?

Before making any assumptions about optimizations we need real data which show the bottle necks. To do something simply because it sounds cool or because someone else did it does not mean it’s of any use in our case.

Because of that we need more profiling options. I already have some thoughts on how to integrate them into the work flow from an UI stand point and how to integrate them into the engine to show accurate data.

I think the biggest challenge (at least for 1.0) will be bringing the Android (and future Emscripten) port on par with the PC version.

I want to remove the old Maratis editor completely with all dependencies we don’t need any more from the repository. That would include the MGui library which is not used by Neo anymore. What do you think about that?

[Sponk]

That looks very interesting!
Could be very helpful for beginners to understand the basics.

[Sponk]

Thanks 😀

[Sponk]

First of all: Thank you for testing!

Yes, every prefab is dependant on the mesh files and textures it uses. Currently you have to manually pack them together to distribute them. An option to automatically pack all dependencies into one archive could be an option for future development.

Btw: Please retest your path issues. I think I fixed it but was not able to test it.

The scaling is as follows: A cube with a length of 1m in Blender will have a length of 10 Units in Neo. That is 10 times as big 😀

The cancel button is fixed now.

Thanks for that screenshot :p
Where can I download this project?

[Sponk]

I’m planning to release 0.4 soon. Please do some final testing and tell me about all issues you experience. This release will be the biggest yet!

[Sponk]

That extension is OpenGL 2.1 so I think it should in principal be safe to use.
The biggest challenge in implementing hardware instancing is batching equal geometry together. I think that should be done whenever a new static mesh is added to the scene. That could bring more performance.

You would also load the material one time only for those batched objects so even more savings there.
Let’s see if we can put that in 0.5 😀

[Sponk]

Deferred rendering is possible but not feasible. We would need to to maintain multiple rendering pipelines for mobile/web/pc and would still need a forward renderer for transparencies. You would also loose the possibility to use custom GLSL shaders for surfaces.

The (in my opinion) better solution is to iterate further on the current renderer and create something new and unique. You can see what AMD did for example: https://diglib.eg.org/EG/DL/conf/EG2012/short/005-008.pdf.abstract.pdf

We need to innovate. Simply doing the same as everyone else is not feasible since we don’t have the resources to compete with them in their own game.

Btw: “Next-Gen” is purely marketing. You can sell everything as “Next-Gen” with enough advertisement. The same goes for “Triple A”.

[Sponk]

You could do that with a custom shader. The default shader should be clean and simple since you won’t use such advanced features on most surfaces.

What actually would be very nice is a tutorial on how to write custom GLSL code for use with Neo and maybe some sort catalogue to share user made materials.

[Sponk]

Thanks for this link 😀 looks very interesting!

[Sponk]

Ok. I added all those features to the road-map on GitHub.
They are all staged for 1.0 the latest but I think most of these smaller features will arrive in 0.5.
0.4 is almost finished since most huge features are implemented. The Emscripten Javascript port still needs file access and the problems with Clang and the player seem to be deep inside SDL2 code.

Those are the most difficult things I have to fix for 0.4 to arrive.

Here are all planned features for 1.0: https://github.com/Sponk/NeoEditor/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue

Please tell me which ones to introduce in 0.5 🙂

[Sponk]

Ok, I will look into those problems.

I uploaded a new version with an improved crash dialog which allows you to send a crash report.
It would be nice if you tried this one 😀

[Sponk]

Your question about the units: http://www.neo-engine.de/wordpress/?page_id=47 :p

The play in editor feature is very, _very_ experimental. Currently only A-Z and the mouse work in-game. Setting the cursor position etc. is not implemented yet. I need to replace the whole SDL keyboard/mouse input system and need to integrate SDL for joystick/gamepad support. What works is the starting and stopping of the game. That was quite a chunk of work and I think that it is quite stable by now.

Btw: Did you experience and problems with the MingW version (crashes, missing dlls, sound issues etc.)? If not I will cross-compile for Windows from now on.

I will look into why the prefab plugin broke tomorrow.

Thanks for testing!

[Sponk]

The problem in your Hit the Boxes game is not an engine issue but an issue in your game.
Simply set the collision shape to sphere or capsule and change the angular factor to 0.

Then everything should work without any shaking.

About your prefab issues: Can you please send me an example file that does not work?

I just fixed the position input issue. The input field was set to integer instead of float.
You will be able to grab it in one of the next daily builds.

Btw: Your game looks quite nice 😀

[Sponk]

Visualizing point lights sounds useful. I will do that as soon as I have time for it 🙂

[Sponk]

I don’t quite know if we talk about the same topic. I meant that you don’t need to do any baking, blending or something else to use an atlas texture. It has nothing to do with pre-baked lights or AO at all.

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