Hi and welcome to the Forums CharlesWoodhill
I hope one day you do join our journey.
At first, yeah this whole thing is cool! This may become something great!
Thank you, it means a lot and we will keep developing until we have the perfect development platform lol
But i too don't have any use for this engine as long i cant code my own (fast) systems
add a 1 to the counter of "i need to code"
(c# preferred
)
Skyline has been designed from the ground up in c++ and we have created a very fast entity system that updates as fast as any other engine that is in the pro market. Yes we use ogre3D for our renderer, but we have also written all the shaders ourselves to give the best graphics and best performance running on the GPU.
As for wanting to code your own systems, skyline is being designed so you don't have to. We understand how many engines can make certain systems feel bloated or slow and we aim to keep things running as fast as possible.
We are in Beta and we do have a few missing features and like you mentioned about the terrain. We are planning on a paging system that will allow unlimited terrains that will load and offload as the player moves around.
Many engines either come as a bare bones package and make you program it all, or some come with half finished features. Skyline is meant for those who don't know the ins and outs of creating a game and many don't have programming experience at all, but this also doesn't mean its game in a box.
Skyline is a genre agnostic engine and this means you can create any type of game you want as long as it is in 3D as we do not have a 2D system yet. Whether you want an FPS, TPS, Racer, Platformer, Side Scrolling Shooter., etc.. it is all possible with the same amount of scripting. For our user programming language, we chose to use Lua as it is a simple language to learn and to read back.
Out the box, skyline comes with a few templates that are FPS, Racing with AI Cars and a melee template. These templates will be expanded to cover many types of different games.
(fast)editable terrain ingame,
The terrain system we use is very fast for editing and can easily be translated in to lua for in game ground deformations, painting and even vegetation adding / removal such as a field of grass that can be removed as a car drives through it.
Since there are many features in skyline, we cannot add everything at once, so we prioritise what we add by what is needed at that moment and what do our users need. If you find yourself making a game that requires editing of terrains or its painting layers and even its vegetation, then we would add the features in for you there and then or in the next update or 2.
keep flexibility, dont hide low level functions/properties
It may look like at first that all the low level properties and functions are not there and this has been designed this way to hide the complexity with simplicity so new or hobbyist users who are not familiar with this level of technology are not overwhelmed with an engine that is so feature packed they do not know where to start. But if you are a pro or indie, then you can lift the covers and discover the internals of the package allowing full customization over most aspects of the engine.
Like the shaders, you could change the entire look and feel of skyline by writing your own shaders, programming your own custom editor plugins or creating attachable scripts with there own dynamic properties that make it easy to pass around your scripts and tweak the properties.
grouping units with a rect (rts) ( doesnt the editor aleady hav/need a similar function..)
This is one that we will be adding in soon as we need a way of selecting multiple entities sooner and as you say, this would be used in an RTS as well to save time programming the same feature.
model hierarchy: a cannon on a turnable socket on a battlecruiser and u maybe sit in it (which is crap because u never would sit in it because, bla bla...)
Yes, we do support attaching of entities to positions already, but we have also planned in a better organising of model hierarchy as you put it, as the current system is a bit awkward to work with and can be improved on a lot.
Runtime performance and better memory management is one of our next tasks with the engine and we are looking at creating zones, octrees, occlusion culling, 64 bit, Hardware instancing(already played with this and have had 10,000 low poly characters at > 60fps lol), plus many many more...
Without going through all the features you have wrote, we do support many of them already and if not, then they are already planned in for being created. The reason we do not have a c++ SDK yet is because many of our users would not require it and therefore it is a lesser priority task.
If you have programmed a feature in c++ as a library, then we are very happy to integrate it into the engine and pass all the commands and controls through to lua which will allow you to use your code in the way you need.
there is enuf out there supporting models/animations/simpleTerrain/collision and so on...i missing real game related systems especially those for NON-FP(s) TP(s) which, for me is the same xept camera location.
you can fully program the camera systems to do what you want, simply add a 2D fixed camera, set it to the active camera and start programming it to do what you want.
since i am no pro and only coding for fun, i hope u dont sit there and laugh yourself to death havin trouble too look through ur tears
but this are things i would expect in a game engine
lol
no worries, all questions and expectations are welcome to be said.
Many of the things you wrote here are going be in implemented and we wont be going to V1.0 and staying in Beta until we have a game engine that can be used to create all types of games without the need of features being added or fixed.
Without users of different skillsets using the engine and putting their feedback and feature requests into the engine, then the more advanced areas wont be added or worked on until they are required by the users or by us as there are many tasks that still need done.
Thanks for taking the time to write the comments and ideas and we appreciate every single one and i hope this has opened the engine up to you or showing features we already have, i may have missed a few topics you were writing about and i apologize if i have. Have fun developing wherever you end up