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  1. Ultra Engine 0.9.3 is here, with usability improvements, bug fixes, and new AI-powered features to make game development easier. You can get a discount now in our store or on Steam all week. "Futuristic Room" by Dennis Cliofis Object creation has been overhauled with a more visual approach that lets you easily select the object you want to add to the scene. You can also insert a new object into the scene tree, under the selected node, or in the scene root. A new component creation tool simplifies new component creation for C++ and Lua. A new smoked glass effect will appear behind some windows. Besides looking great, this provides additional visual cues about the transparency of an image or model. It's disabled by default, so just go to the Tools > Options menu and you'll see an option to enable this effect. AI-powered features are now available on the Steam build with support for text-to-image and seamless texture stitching. Additionally, more than 60 bug reports have been resolved since initial launch. New commands: Camera::SetOrder Camera::SetSweptCulling You can get a discount now in our store or on Steam all week. About Ultra Engine Ultra Engine was created to solve the problems we saw while working on virtual reality projects at NASA. We are developing game engine tools to provide order-of-magnitude faster performance for 3D and VR applications in entertainment, defense, and aerospace.
  2. Ultra Engine unlocks the full power of your GPU to deliver up to 10x faster performance for your game. Ultra Engine is now available in Early Access, both in our store and on Steam. Use coupon code "LAUNCH" to receive a discount before January 1. Ultra Engine is a huge leap in technology that provides a new future-proof foundation, while keeping the strengths and general design philosophy we developed in Leadwerks. There were many major underlying changes made to create a better development platform for your games: Leadwerks Ultra Benefit Editor written in BlitzMax Editor written in C++ Better compatibility, extensions system x86 x64 More addressable memory Win32 / GTK / Cocoa Custom UI Consistent UI across platforms Raw pointers Shared pointers No invalid pointer errors ToLua C++/Lua binding Sol Support for shared pointers Blinn-Phong lighting PBR lighting Better graphical quality FBX asset pipeline glTF asset pipeline PBR materials Single-threaded Multi-threaded Faster performance OpenGL Vulkan Future-proofing 10x Faster Performance Have you ever tried to develop a game, only to have the framerate get slower and slower as you add more content and features? This is especially problematic in virtual reality because low framerates cause motion sickness and can make your game or experience unplayable. Ultra Engine is designed to achieve ultimate scalability and deliver blazingly fast performance as your game grows, with a revolutionary new Vulkan-based architecture that unlocks the full power of your GPU to deliver up to 10x faster performance. Code Games with C++ and Lua Ultra Engine provides an easy-to-learn programming API that can be used with Lua, integrated into Visual Studio Code. Documentation is extensive, with hundreds of code examples demonstrating how to use graphics, physics, raycasting, pathfinding, and other systems to build games and VR applications. Your game code runs on its own thread, so there's no performance penalty for using an interpreted language. Royalty-Free License What you create is yours to play, sell, or give away. You will never be charged royalties or install fees for any application you make. And because we only rely on free open-source middleware libraries, you never have to worry about purchasing expensive licenses from third parties. Physically-based materials Entity component system with multiple components per entity Scriptable editor with plugins system glTF model pipeline AI-powered texture generation Re-projected screen reflections Detailed asset inspection tools You can get Ultra Engine Early Access now. Use coupon code "LAUNCH" to receive a discount before the end of the year. Please see the development roadmap for detailed information about the software's current capabilities. Join us on Discord on Saturday December 23 at 6 PM GMT (10 AM PST) for a special live streaming event!
  3. It looks like everything is in order. I updated the name of the item on your account, and when your current renewal period expires it will go back to the early access $7.99 price. There are controls on the product page to cancel renewals or pre-pay for a block, and it should be very easy to use. Please let me know if anything else needs adjusting.
  4. I'm pleased to announce that Ultra Engine SDK Early Access is now available. Four years ago, I set out to solve the performance problems I was seeing while working on virtual reality projects at NASA. Ultra Engine is the product of a lot of intense research and development during which I invented a new architecture designed for the way modern graphics hardware works. The results exceeded my wildest expectations, providing Ultra Engine with order-of-magnitude faster rendering performance than Leadwerks or Unity. Cyber Samurai by Khoa Minh The initial release is a C++ programming SDK for WIndows that provides access to the all new Ultra Engine API. Similar to Leadwerks, but utilizing modern C++ features like smart pointers, the new API features native support for loading all proprietary Leadwerks formats, so you can easily pull your existing 3D content into the new engine with updated graphics and performance. In addition to being really fast, Ultra Engine provides a ton of new possibilities: The Khronos glTF file format is supported natively, providing an easy way to load thousands of game-ready 3D models. An entity component system provides a formal structure for adding modular game components, and even supports loading and saving of game states. A layer-less terrain system supports up to 256 different materials per terrain. The animation system has a lot of new possibilities you've never seen before, in addition to being incredibly fast. The engine even features documented support for the mythical brush entity, for constructive solid geometry and real-time slicing and dicing. The pathfinding system provides precise creation and control of navigation meshes. Plugins system with plugins for FreeImage, KTX2, and fast BC7 compression. Features that were not very well documented in Leadwerks are clearly laid out with examples, like render-to-texture. Here's a video that goes through some of the new capabilities: Continued Development We're just getting started! There's a lot more great technology on the way. Here are some of the main features in development: New visual editor with customizable extensions VR support Linux and Mac versions C# programming support Lua programming support Advanced global illumination and reflections Box2D physics Newton Dynamics 4 physics Ultra Engine will be licensed at $9.99 a month, with a 20% discount for early adopters. If you would like to join the Ultra Engine journey towards a better tomorrow with maximum efficiency, activate your plan and get started using your new secret weapon. See you on the forum!
  5. @SpiderPigWhat browser are you using?
  6. A few years ago, some folks at NASA asked for my help with some VR projects they were working on. They had switched to Leadwerks and were getting better performance with that, but it still wasn't fast enough for what they were trying to do. I flew from California out to Goddard Space Flight Center to meet with them. When I saw what NASA was doing with my software, my jaw hit the floor. Goddard Space Flight Center Rendering performance in VR is critical because if the framerate drops, it creates a discontinuity between what your visual and vestibular (sense of balance) systems perceive. This causes instant and severe motion sickness and can result in nausea, vomiting, and dizziness. The work NASA was doing with VR involved loading engineering CAD models with tens of millions of polygons and thousands of articulated sub-objects, and displaying them in VR. Naturally, the VR rendering performance for these types of models absolutely crawled. If we were making a VR game we would just optimize the models and design everything to fit within a polygon budget, but engineering requires complex models with many fine details. We couldn't just "optimize away" important details the engineers wanted to inspect in VR. NASA model of International Space Station I came away from that meeting thinking it was an impossible problem to solve, and I flew home to California. Over the next weeks I started thinking "I know this is impossible, but if it were possible, what would it look like?" This lead to the development of a new game engine designed specifically to maximize performance for VR. Today I am happy to reveal performance benchmarks of the new Ultra Engine compared to Leadwerks and Unity. These tests reveal different performance bottlenecks that can occur in real-time applications that would cause slow performance. Testing was performed on Windows 10 with an Nvidia GEForce 1080 GPU. Instanced Geometry Test In this test, a 3D grid of 32,768 instanced cubes is created. This evaluates how the renderer handles a large number of objects with CPU frustum culling enabled. Frustum culling on the CPU is important because it allows the engine to discard large parts of the scene from processing in the rendering loop. It also allows the engine to skip animation for offscreen objects. In this test, Ultra Engine outperforms both Leadwerks and Unity by 20x, with 95% GPU utilization: Animation Test In this test, 1024 animated characters are displayed. Each character has a unique skeleton and is animated independently with no instancing. In this test, Unity outperforms Leadwerks, but Ultra Engine is still more than 18x faster, with much higher GPU utilization: Lighting Test This test renders a scene made up of 1000 instanced boxes and 25 point lights. This provides a measure of how efficiently each engine handles the interaction between lights and objects, and simulates the lighting overhead of a complex scene. In this test the Leadwerks renderer has a significant performance advantage over Unity, but again Ultra Engine is much faster than either: Unique Geometry Test In this test 4096 unique (not instanced) boxes are created and drawn onscreen. This simulates a complex scene with many unique objects. Unity and Leadwerks both struggled to render this scene in real-time, but Ultra Engine ran at an astounding 6000+ frames per second: As you can see, a variety of scenarios that would cause the Unity or Leadwerks renderer to bottleneck run with absolutely no problems in Ultra Engine. This technology is being developed into a full game engine with a visual editor, complete with a plugins and extensions system. Ultra Engine will deliver order-of-magnitude faster performance, to eliminate motion sickness and lower hardware costs for VR applications, as well as general game development. There's no need to spend hours and days optimizing your game, because when you use Ultra Engine your game is already optimized. New editor work-in-progress If you're in Orlando the last week of November, stop by booth #2341 in the small business pavilion during the I/ITSEC 2021 expo to see a live demo of our game-changing new technology. If you would like to be notified when Ultra Engine becomes available, sign up for the mailing list. Update Benchmarks are now available for download.
  7. Ultra App Kit 1.1 is now available on our website and on Steam. This free update brings cross-platform development to our fast resolution-independent GUI toolkit. To download the new installers, click on your account purchases. In addition to Windows, Mac and Linux are now supported, which means you can code once and compile everywhere to easily create cross-platform GUI applications. Builds on Linux use minimal dependencies and will work on virtually any distro without any additional libraries to install. This effectively solves the Linux user interface problem forever and provides us with a strong foundation on which to build new game development tools that look great and run everywhere. Ultra App Kit is gorgeous on macOS and works with both Intel-based Macs or running natively on Apple Silicon. Along with various small bug fixes, version 1.1 adds the following new commands: Display::ClientArea() returns an iVec4 defining the usable area inside the screen, minus any bars the OS uses. Widget::SetFontBold() allows you to display bold text on a widget. Command() allows easy interaction with the system console / terminal. You can get the standalone version now for just $1.99 a month, or get a Steam key for $19.99. Both versions will give you support to build GUI applications for Windows, Linux, and Mac: Updating Ultra App Kit 1.0 Projects The move to cross-platform and ARM support only requires small changes in your existing projects. In Visual Studio, right-click on the solution name and open the Properties editor. In the Linker > Input field, change "App Kit.lib" (release configuration) and "App Kit_d.lib" (debug) both to "AppKit.lib", with no spaces. In the release configuration, change the linker search path from "$(UltraEnginePath)\Libs\Win64" to "$(UltraEnginePath)\Library\Windows\x64\Release". In the debug configuration, change the linker search path from "$(UltraEnginePath)\Libs\Win64" to "$(UltraEnginePath)\Library\Windows\x64\Debug". If you are using a 32-bit build, repeat this process with the 32-bit platform selected, replacing "x64" with "x86". New projects will be generated with correct paths for linking to the engine library.
  8. Built to power a new generation of game development tools, Ultra App Kit provides an easy-to-use C++ programming SDK for creating desktop GUI applications. Unlike other alternatives like Dear ImGui, the Ultra App Kit GUI renders in retained mode rather than immediate mode, and is specifically designed for desktop GUI applications. This makes applications snappy and responsive when resizing or refreshing a window. DPI scaling is baked into the design for resolution-independent graphics on any screen. The GUI can be combined with an embedded OpenGL viewport, or combined with a 3D game engine to make custom editors and game development tools. Check out the video tutorials and read the documentation to learn more. Ultra App Kit can be purchased in our store. API Design C++ shared pointers everywhere Extensible widgets system Extensive documentation with examples for each command UI Features Resolution independent for any DPI scale Load SVG vector images Set widget icons Change mouse cursor Custom color schemes stored in JSON files Supported Widgets Label Button (push, checkbox, radio, and toggle styles) ProgressBar TextField TextArea ComboBox ListBox Slider (scrollbar, trackbar, and stepper styles) Draggable multi-select TreeView Create your own custom widgets Additional Features File I/O File system watcher Memory allocation and management Image loading, saving, processing Package system for loading files from compressed / encrypted archives Plugin system Thread management String manipulation (split, search, conversion, etc.) Message boxes and file / folder requester
  9. Admin

    Merc

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