10 ms·

Xenko Game Engine 2.0 released

74 points by bluesilver07 9y ago

Zekio 9y ago
ohh you can use C# 7 features, gotta play around with it now
zimbatm 9y ago
How is this compared to Unity?
- hesdeadjim 9y ago
  Frankly any comparison is going to be superficial unless the comparison is done by a person who has actually shipped a non-trivial game on both engines. So many of the problems you run into making a game on Unity, Unreal, etc come down to the out-of-the-ordinary requirements of your game and the inevitable peculiarities of the engine itself. Part of becoming an "expert" in building games on a third party engine is knowing where the pain points lie, where you should absolutely not fight The Way It's Done, and what bugs remain unfixed for years on end (Unity asset bundle system, looking at you). Edit: My point being that unless you know the needs of your particular game and have familiarity with a candidate engine, it will be very difficult to determine if your choice is "best" or not.
  - vvanders 9y ago
    As someone who's been through the pain of making UE3 fit for a game it wasn't built for that's one the best nuanced answers I've seen on the subject.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    Reminds me of all the "Lets make a battlezone like shooter"-gamedevs who dropped by on the Spring-Engines dev site. And yes, you are perfectly capable to do that. And no, it wont work well- for the reason, a RTS-Engin has a built in lower physical Simulationframe update- and is allowed to act "slower" to commands then a shooter. So, if you want that shooter to happen- engine rewrite it is.
- drawkbox 9y ago
  They'll be competing similar to Shiva Engine, it will be a mindshare battle as they aren't the first Unity competitor. Unity is the most known and jobs and markets have sprung up around it as well as a massive asset store now exists, it also has many integrations such as apis and tools that take years to acquire. Unreal and Epic have Tencent money and are on the way. The OSS side of this engine is pretty interesting. Will be fun to have another competitor in this area. Xenko looks like a direct Unity competitor even down the the pricing and tiers. The big challenge is the community, asset stores and launched titles under the engine. Branding is important as well, to me Shiva and Xenko are forgettable brands, Unity and Unreal are set in minds.
rwmj 9y ago
Always tell me what the product is in the first sentence or two.
- the_duke 9y ago
  Front page: > Next-Level C# Game Engine > Xenko is an open-source C# game engine designed for the future of gaming. It comes with a full toolchain and is especially well suited to create realistic games but allows you much more!
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - rwmj 9y ago
    But not on this page, which happens to be the first page I've ever read on this project. The Economist is a good example here. In every article, every time a new name or topic is introduced, it will provide a few words describing the person/thing. An example taken from the first sentence of the first article I opened: "Much of the language used by Mike Pence, America’s vice-president, [...]"
    - derefr 9y ago
      Professional journalists write like this, because journalism is intended to be consumed "statelessly"—i.e. with no assumption of previous knowledge. Writers for "progress announcements" blogs like this one, don't tend to write in this style, because these writers know that the only interest anyone would have in a such a blog is if they already knew what the subject was and then wanted to subscribe for updates. Which is to say, deep-linking to a progress-announcement blog from another website is basically almost always entirely useless, and the webmasters of such blogs would actually do well to disable it entirely (e.g. with a robots.txt policy + a server-side hotlink-detection redirection rule) and just suggest that people interested in sharing the announcement, should instead write a few lines of "actual journalism" on their own blog about the release, and then share that. People who like linking directly to primary sources would hate this, but sometimes primary sources are not in the easily-consumed essay or encyclopedia-article styles that much of the modern web has become. Sometimes a primary source is just a commit log, or a diary, where you need to "go back" to get any context. The primary source gets to do what it likes; it's not beholden to the Internet. If someone wants a good summary to share, they're beholden to write one.
je42 9y ago
https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/graphs/contributors https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/graphs/contributors are they stopping with development?
- swsieber 9y ago
  I think they are just closing the source as they make it commercial... Edit: Oh, nevermind - on the home page they explicitly say that they're open source.
  - adrianmalacoda 9y ago
    And by "open source" they mean a proprietary product[0] with "personal" (stripped down and highly restrictive license) and "pro" versions[1], naturally. The old version (which is on github) is GPLv3 apparently. [0] http://xenko.com/legal/eula/ http://xenko.com/legal/eula/ [1] https://store-dev.xenko.com/get-xenko https://store-dev.xenko.com/get-xenko
  - binarycrusader 9y ago
    No, not actually completely open source. In particular, you don't get editor source unless you license the pro or customer versions. Unreal may not be open source, but having source access at all license levels continues to be incredibly attractive.
  - ensignavenger 9y ago
    They say that on the front page, but apparently they are not, from the FAQ "Currently the source code of the Game Studio is available only to Xenko Pro Plus and Custom subscribers on a corporate basis. If you would like to subscribe to Xenko Pro Plus or Custom, please contact us." and "Under the terms of the Xenko end user license agreement, you can share modified versions of Xenko in source code or binary form only to users who have the same Xenko license as you or higher. Additionally, you must include the Xenko end user license agreement at the root of the shared files."
- aeorgnoieang 9y ago
  Maybe the developers just haven't merged back into 'master' in awhile: https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/network https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/network
rel_ev 9y ago
windows.. meh
pjmlp 9y ago
Congratulations on the work achieved, specially on adopting higher level languages. The growing adoption of C# among game engines, brings me back memories of when game engines finally started to allow C++ on their source code.
- emsy 9y ago
  Unity games are often reported to have performance issues, allegedly due to the underlying GC (or lack of understanding of it). I'd rather hope for the adoption of a less messy C++ alternative that is suitable for quasi-realtime applications. So far Jai seems to be the most serious competitor in this regard.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Because Unity uses a Jurassic Mono implementation with a stone age GC and JIT implementation. By the same metrics, we should evaluate performance of C and C++ code by using benchmarks with MS-DOS C and C++ compilers, which should be about the same age. Don't mix languages with implementation when talking about performance.
    - socialist_coder 9y ago
      Amen brother. I think most perf problems in Unity games would go away if Unity updated their GC. It's definitely our #1 source of frame rate hiccups. Plus, it makes you write weird crappy code just to avoid GC allocations. Ugg =(
    - Yuioup 9y ago
      Are there plans to replace Mono with .NET Core?
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        No, Unity guys are doing their own thing with IL2CPP. Basically they generate C++ from MSIL as a means to generate native code, instead of building their own compiler backend. They plan however, to eventually update their Mono runtime. https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/future-plans-for-the-mono-runtime-upgrade.464327/ https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/future-plans-for-the-mono-...
bhewes 9y ago
Cool to see Silicon Studio came out of SGI Japan.
imaginenore 9y ago
If I only had time to learn another game engine. But I'd rather spend it making games with Unreal or Unity, and I doubt Xenko has something important they don't.

74 points by bluesilver07 9y ago

Zekio 9y ago

ohh you can use C# 7 features, gotta play around with it now

zimbatm 9y ago

How is this compared to Unity?

hesdeadjim 9y ago
Frankly any comparison is going to be superficial unless the comparison is done by a person who has actually shipped a non-trivial game on both engines. So many of the problems you run into making a game on Unity, Unreal, etc come down to the out-of-the-ordinary requirements of your game and the inevitable peculiarities of the engine itself. Part of becoming an "expert" in building games on a third party engine is knowing where the pain points lie, where you should absolutely not fight The Way It's Done, and what bugs remain unfixed for years on end (Unity asset bundle system, looking at you). Edit: My point being that unless you know the needs of your particular game and have familiarity with a candidate engine, it will be very difficult to determine if your choice is "best" or not.
- vvanders 9y ago
  As someone who's been through the pain of making UE3 fit for a game it wasn't built for that's one the best nuanced answers I've seen on the subject.
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  Reminds me of all the "Lets make a battlezone like shooter"-gamedevs who dropped by on the Spring-Engines dev site. And yes, you are perfectly capable to do that. And no, it wont work well- for the reason, a RTS-Engin has a built in lower physical Simulationframe update- and is allowed to act "slower" to commands then a shooter. So, if you want that shooter to happen- engine rewrite it is.
drawkbox 9y ago
They'll be competing similar to Shiva Engine, it will be a mindshare battle as they aren't the first Unity competitor. Unity is the most known and jobs and markets have sprung up around it as well as a massive asset store now exists, it also has many integrations such as apis and tools that take years to acquire. Unreal and Epic have Tencent money and are on the way. The OSS side of this engine is pretty interesting. Will be fun to have another competitor in this area. Xenko looks like a direct Unity competitor even down the the pricing and tiers. The big challenge is the community, asset stores and launched titles under the engine. Branding is important as well, to me Shiva and Xenko are forgettable brands, Unity and Unreal are set in minds.

rwmj 9y ago

Always tell me what the product is in the first sentence or two.

the_duke 9y ago
Front page: > Next-Level C# Game Engine > Xenko is an open-source C# game engine designed for the future of gaming. It comes with a full toolchain and is especially well suited to create realistic games but allows you much more!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rwmj 9y ago
  But not on this page, which happens to be the first page I've ever read on this project. The Economist is a good example here. In every article, every time a new name or topic is introduced, it will provide a few words describing the person/thing. An example taken from the first sentence of the first article I opened: "Much of the language used by Mike Pence, America’s vice-president, [...]"
  - derefr 9y ago
    Professional journalists write like this, because journalism is intended to be consumed "statelessly"—i.e. with no assumption of previous knowledge. Writers for "progress announcements" blogs like this one, don't tend to write in this style, because these writers know that the only interest anyone would have in a such a blog is if they already knew what the subject was and then wanted to subscribe for updates. Which is to say, deep-linking to a progress-announcement blog from another website is basically almost always entirely useless, and the webmasters of such blogs would actually do well to disable it entirely (e.g. with a robots.txt policy + a server-side hotlink-detection redirection rule) and just suggest that people interested in sharing the announcement, should instead write a few lines of "actual journalism" on their own blog about the release, and then share that. People who like linking directly to primary sources would hate this, but sometimes primary sources are not in the easily-consumed essay or encyclopedia-article styles that much of the modern web has become. Sometimes a primary source is just a commit log, or a diary, where you need to "go back" to get any context. The primary source gets to do what it likes; it's not beholden to the Internet. If someone wants a good summary to share, they're beholden to write one.

je42 9y ago

https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/graphs/contributors https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/graphs/contributors are they stopping with development?

swsieber 9y ago
I think they are just closing the source as they make it commercial... Edit: Oh, nevermind - on the home page they explicitly say that they're open source.
- adrianmalacoda 9y ago
  And by "open source" they mean a proprietary product[0] with "personal" (stripped down and highly restrictive license) and "pro" versions[1], naturally. The old version (which is on github) is GPLv3 apparently. [0] http://xenko.com/legal/eula/ http://xenko.com/legal/eula/ [1] https://store-dev.xenko.com/get-xenko https://store-dev.xenko.com/get-xenko
- binarycrusader 9y ago
  No, not actually completely open source. In particular, you don't get editor source unless you license the pro or customer versions. Unreal may not be open source, but having source access at all license levels continues to be incredibly attractive.
- ensignavenger 9y ago
  They say that on the front page, but apparently they are not, from the FAQ "Currently the source code of the Game Studio is available only to Xenko Pro Plus and Custom subscribers on a corporate basis. If you would like to subscribe to Xenko Pro Plus or Custom, please contact us." and "Under the terms of the Xenko end user license agreement, you can share modified versions of Xenko in source code or binary form only to users who have the same Xenko license as you or higher. Additionally, you must include the Xenko end user license agreement at the root of the shared files."
aeorgnoieang 9y ago
Maybe the developers just haven't merged back into 'master' in awhile: https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/network https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/network

rel_ev 9y ago

windows.. meh

pjmlp 9y ago

Congratulations on the work achieved, specially on adopting higher level languages. The growing adoption of C# among game engines, brings me back memories of when game engines finally started to allow C++ on their source code.

emsy 9y ago
Unity games are often reported to have performance issues, allegedly due to the underlying GC (or lack of understanding of it). I'd rather hope for the adoption of a less messy C++ alternative that is suitable for quasi-realtime applications. So far Jai seems to be the most serious competitor in this regard.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Because Unity uses a Jurassic Mono implementation with a stone age GC and JIT implementation. By the same metrics, we should evaluate performance of C and C++ code by using benchmarks with MS-DOS C and C++ compilers, which should be about the same age. Don't mix languages with implementation when talking about performance.
  - socialist_coder 9y ago
    Amen brother. I think most perf problems in Unity games would go away if Unity updated their GC. It's definitely our #1 source of frame rate hiccups. Plus, it makes you write weird crappy code just to avoid GC allocations. Ugg =(
  - Yuioup 9y ago
    Are there plans to replace Mono with .NET Core?
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      No, Unity guys are doing their own thing with IL2CPP. Basically they generate C++ from MSIL as a means to generate native code, instead of building their own compiler backend. They plan however, to eventually update their Mono runtime. https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/future-plans-for-the-mono-runtime-upgrade.464327/ https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/future-plans-for-the-mono-...

bhewes 9y ago

Cool to see Silicon Studio came out of SGI Japan.

imaginenore 9y ago

If I only had time to learn another game engine. But I'd rather spend it making games with Unreal or Unity, and I doubt Xenko has something important they don't.