Hi & Best Wishes for the New Year.

After a long overdue break we are back to work, brimming with enthusiasm for the future of Skyline. This year there are some huge changes to Skyline and the licenses, the most notable is that the free lite version will become fully commercial, yes you can earn money from your games.

We believe that if you use the Skyline lite version to make a great game you should still be rewarded, after all it is your game. No earning restriction, 100% profit from your game! (Although it would be nice if you are earning from your Skyline game to support our development by purchasing a Pro version). There are still a few small feature limitations and you will have to buy the extra plugin extensions if and when you need them.

This brings me onto the next exciting advancement, that of the plug-in extensions. This area has been improved so that all the new editors we are developing will be, where possible built via the extensions. Using Skyline to develop and expand Skyline, this will help us develop new tools quicker as there is no compile time. What this means for you is that you too can create and expand Skyline to suit your needs. Over the year we will be exposing much of Skylines core to the already long list of editor side commands.

Interface

The Interface has had a huge makeover in look and feel, massive thank you to planetX for creating the new clean interface and working closely with us to improve workflow and legibility. All commands that are left over from the beta will also be removed, leaving only the working parts. Plus we have finally got the centre dock window widget enabled, this gives more scope for customisable layouts. Oh I nearly forgot to mention, if you don’t like dark skins there is also a light skin(currently WIP).

Game Objects

The game objects has had a makeover including some management options such as the new ability to load different game object libraries. A full editor for creating your own libraries is available from the store or included with the Skyline Pro version. Also we have added a new feature called Dna. The Dna are special game object items that can generate new content such as the player character.
Eg, add your model and click the New Player Dna and voila your model now is now ready to use. There is also an editor associated with the New Player Dna for custom player features such as camera, abilities and so on.

Gui Editor

We have been working on the Gui Editor, we know many of you don’t want to use css and html to create your interfaces, now you don’t have to. The editor features many premade drag and drop components. You can now quickly get an interactive ui for your project or game display.

The editor camera has had a few changes these include Newtonian movement, making it feel smoother. Plus there has been loads of fixes and tweaks to the system making Skyline even more stable.

This year we have decided to focus on getting all of the t’s crossed and I’s dotted as they say. To make Skyline the easy to use solid game development platform we envisioned many years ago. This may mean not as many updates as usual but don’t worry if your update license runs out.

We want to gift all of our users that have supported us by purchasing Skyline with another year of free auto updates.

Happy New Year
Your Skyline Dev team.

Proposed 2019 Roadmap:

• Post effects
• Effect Volumes
• Tree system
• Character Improvements
• Navmesh upgrades to include smother rotations and bridging.
• River System
• More Dna and Game objects
• Manual Lods
• Vertex Animations
• Screen space decals
• Reflection probes
• Area lights
• Real-time radiocity
• headless server
• Oh and the long overdue documents and tutorials!