News

This final entry in the 013 update series has brought some closure to the missing settings of the world panel, with room & weather transitions to give more natural effects. On top of all this, we’ve gone and done another performance sweep, optimising what’s there, and removing what’s no longer needed, resulting in a much higher fps!

After the success of eradicating all the known bugs that survived the World Panel update, we have spent the last few weeks working on a more improved back-end system. Instanced Rendering. Through clever use of CPU to GPU memory batching, the total draw calls have drastically been reduced, resulting in a much more efficient rendering pipeline. We’ve also thrown in some new Particle features as well as a slight improvement to the UI.

The new world panel brought a plethora of new features and settings to use and abuse, but given the size of the update, it wasn’t surprising that a few bugs managed to make it through in-house testing. In the 0.1.3 update series, we’ll be taking a step back from new features to improve and repair the existing systems in preparation for the terrain rework patch coming later this summer!

This update brought the conclusion to the 0.1.2 series and is the biggest update released to date. The Game Clock is here, along with the Room System. Put all together, Bright Engine is now capable of creating dynamic worlds with Day & Night Cycles, weather simulation, displacement cloud layers and orbital sun simulations. All neatly packaged into a fully fletched Room System, allowing you to update the atmospherics and feeling of your scene based on your surroundings!

This latest update brought a much-needed rework on several systems while also laying the foundation for upcoming systems such as Light Probes, Baking and Day/Night Cycles! Skyboxes are now significantly more optimised, and approximately 2500 lines of duplicate/redundant code were removed from the project. Model LOD was introduced to allow for more optimisation capabilities for the artists, along with lots of minor bug fixes.

As we said at the end of the last patch notes, we’ve taken a step back from terrain sculpting to focus on optimisation and general improvements to the Engine’s infrastructure. And so, the v0.1.2 update is coming in 3 parts, a, b and c. Each one fundamentally stabilises and improves existing systems so that Bright Engine remains at the highest quality possible as we move forward into the future. This update was our complete overhaul of the particle system, introducing more advanced capabilities as well as fixing a lot of the issues in older versions.

Over the past month, the development team have been hard at work redesigning a lot of the core systems to improve performance. The bulk of it is still unfinished, but so far, we’ve already seen large leaps in performance and sizable drops in memory usage, so it’s exciting to see how much more speed we can push out of Bright Engine!