Follow along the development of Bright Engine and Bright Life.
Here we are at the final update of the 015 update series, happy to present a significantly more stable engine! We bring this update series to a close with a significant boost in performance, drastic improvements to the tools & Editor Interface, and, as promised, the biggest bug-fixing update released to date!
After two months of vigorously sweeping through thousands of lines of code, ripping out old systems with new ones and altering the architecture of the renderer, we are very proud to present a much more visually stunning engine! With brand-new lighting algorithms, advanced shadows, new post-processing and more detailed GPU diagnostics, Bright Engine has drastically improved both its performance and results!
To kick start the first of many updates in 2019, we begin with the 0.1.5 series. As previously mentioned in the 0.1.4c patch notes, this series of updates is all about improving what already exists in the engine. We want to introduce better visuals, more stability and higher performance than ever before, and for this update, we begin with the most fundamental part of the engine. It’s core. We’ve added more compatibility with additional file formats, performed some usability prototyping and wiped out a lot of bugs!
This series of updates have had the goal of creating comprehensive tools for world-building, and so we are finishing it off with two new tools: Dynamic Foliage & the Model Brush. You are now able to create entire fields and forests within moments with these new semi-procedural tools.
In the last patch, we brought about a comprehensive sculpting system that allowed for complex terrain structures via easy-to-use tools. Now we take one step closer to a completed terrain system by introducing Painting! With up to 8 layers of textures to paint with, users can now bring more life to their environments!
We’re kicking off this next series of updates with a smaller but necessary update. We’ve done a complete overhaul on the Terrain Sculpting system, adding new tools as well as improving the old ones while, at the same time, laying the foundation for the coming updates!
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.