October Development Blog

So, this week has been a bit of a strange one when it comes to developing but all good things are still happening. Our chimney is now fixed and the studios rooms are now decorated with a new tin of paint and the room is looking a lot more fresh and up to date hehe.. but no equipment is back in just yet. 

But this has not stopped us developing and we have been planning how to make a cool new character editor that will generate easy skyline characters with animations from mixamo with their current free trend while retaining a legal license, which means not everything can be done in the way you want. These characters will also have instant game mechanics to boot for quick game setups and keeping a slight originality at the same time. But hey, this is what is provided in mod tools and many hobbyist users tend to enjoy them :)
If you have been keeping up in the forums, then you will know that this is just a plan and it will take some time to develop.

We have also created a new mesh merging tool that will generate a new mesh from several meshes that you have selected in the scene. Great for making usable buildings if you purchased and downloaded a modular building kit and found that it was a complete PITA to put a level together in skyline using the individual wall and window parts :P But this new tool will save you time and give you reusable assets. It does not offer any performance over the individual assets apart from simply array looping and much quicker to apply physics, but we have systems in our minds to develop which will offer you the performance upgrades you are looking for.

As mentioned before, a form of JSON has been added as well as the ability to delete multiple selected entities in the scene which makes things a bit easier hehe :P Plus many more bug fixes that we have found and some still to do.

I have spent some time looking in the Ogre3d upgrade for skyline and to put together a 64 bit build, but it seems their source libraries are in the most confusing state i have seen them in a while with so many branches that are currently being developed. I am sure that what they have works very well, but when looking into getting a 1.9(our current version) again, it seems many of the samples are no longer working and could result in broken features inside skyline such as the terrain. Ogre 2.1 seems like a great feature set but there source is missing many component projects from the visual studio .sln either because they are broken or not working with the new version code. 
This has all put it back a bit as we now have to put together some new testbeds to test what works and what doesn't to determine the amount of work it really is going to take to upgrade skyline and this is the reason why you all haven't heard much about our progress with 64bit, DX11 and OpenGL. 

We are still working hard to deliver you users the best game engine we can that supports most of your features and performance requests while maintaining a simple and easy to use platform.

Thats it for now, and i will be signing off now. Happy Developing! :D