This is where you can introduce yourself to the community, introduce your projects and what you plan to do with skyline. You can share as much or as little info as you wish.

Hello a new user

Hello a new user

Postby SpiderMack » 02 Dec 2016, 09:57

Hi everybody.
I discovered this hidden gem engine and i was surprised i never heard about it, i worked in my free time on some indies games teams as game and level designer with Unity on jrpg games or fps games and i am experienced with 3D software packages.
I am very familiar with Unity, Shiva 3D, Torque 3D or UDK , but Skyline is more friendly environment with a perfect balance between friendly usage and available tech ( Skyline environment is better overall for my personnal game). What made my decision is software pricing and updates friendly better than Unity Pro subscription.

Some unkwnown about Skyline
Can Skyline adopt F+ ? http://www.3dgep.com/forward-plus/
Prefabs support ?
Does OSVR supports SteamVR ?
When Skyline on Steam ?
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Re: Hello a new user

Postby SolarPortal » 02 Dec 2016, 12:03

Hi and Welcome to the Forums SpiderMack :D
Yes, we often get the part that people don't hear about us often which will change when we hit steam.
You seem quite experienced and would be interested in seeing what you can do with the engine.

Skyline's publicly released version is known as Gen1, its based on a DX9 renderer with aging technology.
I think Gen2 is what you are after as this uses a method called Forward3D which uses a tiled forward lighting system which allows many more lights to render in the scene with much better performance over Gen1. 1 big light is the same performance as many Small lights. Gen2 uses OpenGL3+ and DX11 however it is unfinished and not ready for public viewing yet and only testing for commercial indie users of skyline.. Gen2 is also boasting modern post processing such as HDR, HBAO and many many more postFx to come. Gen2 also has 3x-16x performance over Gen1, but i say this to others.. its still a game engine and will slow down if things are not as optimised as best they can be, but we believe the performance is at least comparable with modern engines.

As for Steam, we will be green lighting in the next couple month as we are trying to setup a video for showcasing the engine and steam has quite strict rules about what you can show and what must be available to the users that is shown. Gen2 is also in private alpha at the moment ironing out all the bugs and getting the remaining featureset that is not transferred from Gen1 yet. We have made lots of headway and the testers have been extremely helpful with recording bugs and also improving workflows to make things smoother for all. We hope to enter Beta with Gen2 soon. Also the documentation is getting a rework hopefully in time for a steam release to teach the engine better; saying this though, many users have gotten used to skyline without any documentation.

Is OSVR compatible with Steam VR? Well, this one i don't actually know. OSVR was built to be fully open source and already adapted other HMDs to work within its sourcebase. So i dont see why not with a few tweaks. Footage that has been recorded by other people on the internet has rendered well within the OSVR HMD if not a little low rez with screen but they do have newer HMD's available now. Something i will have to do some research on and get back to you :)

Prefabs support ?

We dont use the normal prefab routines every other engine does. What we have are called Presets which are similar except these can be complete scene entities or multiple entities that can have scripts, actions and graphs attached that when dropped in the scene work as if you just programmed them in from scratch. Essentially, if you added your full scene to a preset, dropping it out would give you a complete game lol :P

A bit about programming in skyline:
Scripting in skyline uses the lua language which may not be as fast as c#, but it is capable of making a game with; this coupled will all lua functions calling through to c++ functions which may do grunt work can be faster than programming it in straight lua and expansion on the API is very easy. We do have plans for c# and c++ but the demand has not yet been met to be worth implementing at this stage.
  • Scripts can also be shared if they are external and if you program them with the Dynamic properties, then 1 script can be written and you can change unlimited properties that you set up to do different things, ie.. an NPC script could be shared between villagers, zombies, players etc.. this makes writing code less and quicker to develop your game.
  • Microscripts are scripts that are not stored in a file or not external, these are attached directly to the entities in the scene. They have the full power of external scripts and also contain the dynamic properties.
  • Actions: The action system is a c++ component that can be added to virtually any entity type with specific limitations depending on entity type its being attached to in the engine. (e.g. adding an action to an empty node that edits or moves a model wont be possible as its not a model entity.)
    The actions are the fastest system in Skyline and there are many actions available that can be added to entities to give more functionality, but doing more outside of the actions is a lot harder as they are quite independent but can be hooked together.
    Actions are great for things like, middleware hookins, simple things like rotating an entity, adding physics to entities, adding particle effects, setting up character controllers, basic cameras etc...
  • This is why we have the "Visual Modules" system, this is a visual block based programming system for creating game mechanics, although still in its early days, it has proven to run faster than scripts and quicker to setup mechanics with an unlimited way of hooking bits together, but may be missing a few key modules needed; which we can add upon request.
    Its highly customisable unlike actions which have a base set of properties to change and edit. Visual modules are planned to be the main programming pipeline in skyline for games with lua for those that don't like visual programming.

I hope this answers some of your questions and i still think Gen2 skyline is the one you will be needing.

Final note, we are only a 2 person team that have been designing this engine for 5-6 years now on passion alone for game technology with very low budget and will continue to do so through any extremes(very stubborn lol :P). We try and offer the best support we can to whatever stage user and try to fix any major bugs you bring within a couple versions, same with any requests if they are in a manageable time :)
We have multiple users on this forum that are helping us out greatly with different areas such as documentation or assets and are also testers on Gen2 skyline so they will also help if they can :)
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Re: Hello a new user

Postby SpiderMack » 02 Dec 2016, 14:12

Final note, we are only a 2 person team that have been designing this engine for 5-6 years now on passion alone for game technology with very low budget and will continue to do so through any extremes

It got what is needed to make awesome game :D
Is this shader (normal , silouette , toon shadowing) possible ?
http://img.clubic.com/08474166-photo-the-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild.jpg

Scripting in skyline uses the lua language which may not be as fast as c#, but it is capable of making a game with; this coupled will all lua functions calling through to c++ functions which may do grunt work can be faster than programming it in straight lua and expansion on the API is very easy. We do have plans for c# and c++ but the demand has not yet been met to be worth implementing at this stage.

I like a lot simple complete Api of Skyline.
C# is very popular, C++ is faster , both are faster than Lua, C# can be interesting.

This is why we have the "Visual Modules" system, this is a visual block based programming system for creating game mechanics, although still in its early days, it has proven to run faster than scripts and quicker to setup mechanics with an unlimited way of hooking bits together, but may be missing a few key modules needed; which we can add upon request.

If you add C# or C++ we can make custom modules.

We have made lots of headway and the testers have been extremely helpful with recording bugs and also improving workflows to make things smoother for all. We hope to enter Beta with Gen2 soon

When i purchase i will be interested in Beta testing Gen 2 :)
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Re: Hello a new user

Postby SolarPortal » 02 Dec 2016, 14:31

Awesome :)

Toon shading is possible as are most shader effects, but we would need to program it as Gen2 currently does not have a custom shader pipeline... yet! :P The idea is to have a system where you can prototype shaders and systems but have them hook into the main rendering pipeline, so these things are possible just not yet. Gen1 allows you to create custom shaders but they wont port easily to Gen2 unless written in .hlsl, .glsl as most of Gen1 was programmed in .cg :shock:

When Gen2 does have a pipeline for custom shaders, then we will announce it in a release update.

yes, a c++ sdk has been in plans for a couple of years now and will be the first one we aim at as it does give the most scope for custom modules, actions and also the ability to add your own lua functions. :)

Hope this helps :D

Edit: p.s. i am looking forward to the new Zelda game also :D
Skyline Game Engine - Lead Dev.
Please provide as much info as possible when asking for help.


Specs: OS: Win 10 64bit, CPU: Intel i7 4770 3.4ghz x 4 core(8 threads), GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, Ram: 16gig DDR3, Windows on 250gb Samsung Evo 860

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Re: Hello a new user

Postby StarFire » 02 Dec 2016, 18:42

Hi SpiderMack and welcome to Skyline! :D

If you need any help please ask as we are a friendly community and many of us are on at different times so there will generally be a fast response to your post. If its some specific feature request, lua code, module, action , then we will take a look at adding it. If its within reason we will endeavor to get it in an upcoming auto-update for you, also the same with any bugs/issues you pass to us.

We are developing new learning documentation but you should get a few ideas from the existing docs, also take a look at the great Skyline resources from from two of our community, @Tatty's Videos and @epsilonion documentation. :D
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Re: Hello a new user

Postby SpiderMack » 02 Dec 2016, 20:16

We are developing new learning documentation but you should get a few ideas from the existing docs, also take a look at the great Skyline resources from from two of our community, @Tatty's Videos and @epsilonion documentation.

The video tutorials are great starters thank you.
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