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Ultra Engine Documentation

Welcome to the Ultra Engine documentation. Here you will learn how to use the software to build high-performance games and applications with the world's fastest game engine.

Ultra Engine is currently available in early access mode, consisting of a C++ programming SDK for Windows that serves as a foundation for continued development.

System Requirements

You can run the Ultra Engine benchmarks to make sure your computer is compatible.

Installation

First, download and install the Ultra Engine Client. This application will allow you to install different versions of the game engine and receive updates. When you open the application you will be prompted to sign into your Ultra Engine account. If you do not have an account yet, you can create one here.

When you sign into your account in the application, it will look like this:

The Projects tab displays a list of your projects for easy access, and allows new project creation.

The Updates tab allows you to select and install a version of the engine.

The Community tab contains links to community features you can access on our site.

The Learn tab contains links to documentation.

The Billing tab contains information about your account and plan.

The Settings tab contains various settings for the cient application.

When your subscription plan is active, you can select a channel in the Updates panel and install the engine. If your plan is not active, you can renew it here.

The default channel will contain the current stable build, which does not change. You can select a newer version and receive more frequent updates, but the releases will not be as thoroughly tested. If you want to switch channels, uninstall the engine and select a new channel to install.

Once the game engine is installed you can create a new project in the Projects tab. Press the Create button, fill in the required information, and press okay to get started.

The folder containing your project will be opened. You can open the .sln file with Visual Studio and start coding. You can run any of the examples in this documentation by copying and pasting the code into your main.cpp file. Compile and run the project and the example will be shown.

Your project will be listed in the projects panel for easy access.

Updating

The Updates tab will show an indicator when an update is available. After installing the update, you may see an icon indicating that some of your projects are out of date. This happens when the files in the project templates receive any changes.

You can click the icon to see a list of all the files that have been modified. When you press the OK button to update the project, the new files will overwrite your existing project files. To prevent accidental data loss, a copy of your project file will be saved in the "backup" folder in your project directory.

You can view changes in text-based files by pressing the Diff button. This will open both versions of the file side-by-side and allow you to pick and choose which changes you want to insert. This feature requires Visual Studio Code to be installed, or you can set your own diff tool and command line in the Settings tab.

Distribution

Only the release build of your game should be distributed. The debug build of your game will end with the suffix "_d.exe" and should not be included.

You can pack all game data files (models, textures, etc.) into an encrypted Zip package to protect them. Just load the archive at the beginning of your program with this code:

auto pak = LoadPackage("gamedata.zip");// load the archive
pak->SetPassword("xxxxxxxxxxxxx");// set your own password here

Note that AES encryption is not supported. If your Zip compression program has an option for legacy encryption, you should use that.

If your game makes use of Lua, you should include the file "lua51.dll".

The debug build stores the physics library as separate DLLs for external debugging. The release build does not need these DLLs:

Your game should not include the shader source code files (.vert, .frag., .geom, .comp, .tese, .tesc). Only the compiled .spv files should be included.

If your code does not load any plugins you do not need to include the DLLs in the "Plugins" directory.

You should not distribute any files from the client application folder like the library, headers, template files, etc.

The only dependency your end users need to install is the Microsoft Visual Studio Redistributable. There's a good chance they already have it installed from another game or application, but you should package this in your installer or select it in the install settings for your game on Steam.

Continuing Development

This is just the beginning. There's a lot more great technology on the way! Here are some of the main features in development:

Your feedback is always valued, so feel free to make a suggestion for any features you'd like to see in upcoming releases.

Copyright © 2023 Ultra Software.
All rights reserved.