Facilis Engine / News: Recent posts

Various bug fixes and additions, such as:

- Sprite batching
- Xna render system now uses XNA Beta 2.
- Created an InputSystem with DirectInput and Xna implementations (SDL will be added later).

The next release will be versioned 0.3.0 and will have a significant api overhaul.

System.Windows.Forms and System.Drawing have been removed, as those namespaces are not supported on the xbox 360.

A scriptable material system has been added.

Support for the XNA framework has been improved, but is still very incomplete.

Facilis ran on Vista build 5728 for the first time, in opengl mode, with nvidia's driver installed. Every demo except Swirl works perfectly. Swirl results in a black screen for some unknown reason.

This release has a few new features, such as stenciling, clip planes, and sphere mapping.

Mac OS X is no longer a preview, as OpenGL extensions are loading properly on that platform now. The Model and Actor demos are still through strange errors though, despite working fine in Linux.

A very early Xna render system has been added. At the moment it's barely functional. The lack of documentation for Xna will mean it will take a while to implement.... read more

Well, turns out I lied about no more major API changes. XNA beta will be released August 30, and it will be encapsulated in a third rendersystem (in addition to Managed Directx 1.1 and OpenGL). In order for Facilis Engine to run on the XBOX 360 I'll have to remove its dependence on System.Drawing and System.Windows.Forms, which will require a significant overhaul of the windowing and event handling APIs.

After a hardware failure, the project is up and running again.

This release has no really major changes other than the ability for Facilis.Graphics.Demos.exe to toggle between fullscreen and windowed.

The api and underlying code of the Facilis.Graphics namespace are solid enough that the project is now considered alpha.

The .net framework stopped working a couple weeks ago, and despite my efforts wouldn't work again. After trying to reinstall windows, my computer is no longer booting. Apparently I have a hardware issue. Joy.

-Facilis Engine is still only a preview on Mac OS X, and will remain so until Mono is
more stable on that platform and someone else is able to debug it on a Mac far more
modern than mine.
-Provided config files for Linux and Mac OS X so that the end user does not need
to manually alter mono's dll remappings. These config files may still need to be
changed on different Linux distributions. To use the config files, remove the
platform name (for example, Facilis.dll.config.Linux to Facilis.dll.config).
-Added depth sorting of nonopaque renderables.
-Improved the particle engine and added support for hardware accelerated point sprites.
-Added a simple particle emitter demo.

The binaries now function on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X without rebuilding or plugins, with caveats. See readme.txt for details. Mac OS X support should only be considered a preview at this time.

Facilis doesn't appear to be having significant performance issues under Linux after all. The low frame rate is due to being in vsync mode. I didn't think that was the case originally because the framerate occasionally spikes, rather than staying at 60 fps. I believe this is due to the driver having trouble keeping in sync with my LCD monitor. This doesn't surprise me as SuSE really doesn't like that monitor; it took me forever to setup.

Facilis ran on SuSE Linux 10.0 today. The framerate was unencouraging though. I don't believe this is a device or driver error, as hardware acceleration is enabled, and native 3D applications run beautifully. If I were to guess I'd say Mono is too slow for this sort of thing for now. Further debugging will reveal the truth.

I'm not going to do another file release until the binaries work on each platform without rebuilding. As it is, a few tweaks are required. I intend to provide plugins for each platform, and one would simply specify which plugins to use in a config file.

For some time Facilis was throwing an obscure exception on Mac OS X. I finally figured out that on that platform, Mono doesn't like constructors with more than 13 parameters. Matrix4's constructor formerly took 16. Fixed.

Additionally, using SDL with a non-c language has always been problematic on that platform. The OS X portion of SDL is written in objective-c, which doesn't play nicely with languages other than c and c++. Thus some extra work was required to get SDL to start up.

-This release will still only function in windows.
-Added a simple vertex shader demo. The OpenGL version requires that
cg be installed.
-Improved ability for GraphicsEngine to shut down gracefully.
-Added two engine demos: Models and Actors. These had already been developed
as of 0.1, but were not included because GraphicsEngine needed to be improved
to shut down gracefully.
-Improved error handling and logging. Errors are output to the console and to
facilis.log (or whatever file the user specifies).

Facilis Engine 0.1 prealpha

This is the first ever release, and may be unstable under some circumstances.

This release only works with windows.

The directx rendersystem requires managed directx 1.1 (February 2006).

The opengl rendersystem should work correctly straight out of the box.