Black Engine / News: Recent posts

A ton of time has been spent on this release. There is a Framework behind it now which will allow for games to easily be built with the engine.

The list of new features is massive so check the ReadMe in the package for those.

Also this is the first Cross-Platform release so there are both Linux and Win32 packages for download.

The next version will come much faster then this one did with many more improvements and features that are a bit more apparent to the layman.... read more

A ton of work has gone into the next version of Black Engine. It will feature a new Framework which will allow it to be used as a game engine, and it will be fully cross platform. I took everything I learned from working on Black Engine and other large projects and applied that to this new version. It's 95% completely new, and very standardized code. So keep checking back, there will be a release in late December.... read more

This release is a huge step forward to Black Engine.

It included everything mentioned before as well as the framework code for entities. Which was actually planned for the next release.

There seems to be an issue with the HSR (Hidden Surface Removal) but it does not rear it's ugly head in the test data provided with this release.

So the road map looking forward includes:
- Tracking down the new HSR bug
- Implementing lighting
- Massive refactoring of entire code base, an entirely new architecture based on the MVC (Model View Control) design pattern
- Collision detection
- Greater configuration provided by launch GUI (win32)
- ?Tweaking the timing class?
- Entirely new camera class
- Pseudo physics (i.e. gravity & such)... read more

There was a long period of inactivity with the project but work has renewed with vigor in the past month and the engine has undergone a lot of changes, re-writes, and additions.

The next release (soon) will feature:
- v30 BSP file loader
- Level 1 hidden surface removal using BSP Trees and PVSs (sPotentially Visible Set)
- Proper texture alignment
- Improved camera class alleviating many control oddities
- A lot of ground work for future flexibility
- Largely refactored code resulting in a *cleaner* (not yet clean though) architecture... read more

The BSP loader is being re-tooled to load Quake2 / Half-Life BSPs for two reasons. !) That Quake3 uses shaders instead of textures which are complex scripts that control the video card's per-pixel shading for that texture. I don't want to have to write a shader reader nor do i want to have to write these shader scripts when creating textures. 2) And this is the big one. I don't want to use Q3Radiant for map creation, I think that is a horrible little flaming pile of ****. So This way I can use WorldCraft for my map creation and textures are much simpler to deal with.