Hi and Welcome to the Forums SpiderMack
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
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
). 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