Behind the scenes: ezEngine

posted on September 17th, 2014, 6:56 am

Out of intrest, what version of direct x does the engine support? 10/11 or 9?

posted on September 17th, 2014, 6:58 am

ez will only support DX11 and up.

posted on September 17th, 2014, 7:38 am

ez will only support DX11 and up.

Uuuuhhh

like it

posted on September 17th, 2014, 9:26 am

ez will only support DX11 and up.

Well, crap. My awesome-from-4-years-ago gtx 275 only supports dx10. Do I really have to buy a new card?

posted on September 17th, 2014, 9:33 am

They may take time so been 2 years so far i think we be looking at 3 more yet it would be nice if they could give us some info on how long they think it may take or when they hope it may come out just so we know every game/mod can tell you that but FO or how much in % they think they do so far like anything really like come ON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How do you give an estimate on something that is being created by scratch from another team who are doing it for free? It really is a case of it is done when it is done and patience is a virtue.

Also they spent 2 years working with Armada's engine so it doesnt count towards their progress on this so the clock is reset I am afraid.

posted on September 17th, 2014, 9:35 am

ez will only support DX11 and up.

Well, crap. My awesome-from-4-years-ago gtx 275 only supports dx10. Do I really have to buy a new card?

by the time of release, you may find your card is awesome from 5 or 6 years ago. not 4. dx11 cards are very common and available in all price points already, in a couple years you'll probably find that your gtx 275 limits you in nearly every recent game, not just FO.

posted on September 17th, 2014, 9:39 am

There is a difference between the DX11 API (what ez will support) and the DX10 / DX11 feature set. Only because your graphics card does not support the full DX11 feature set, does not mean that a DX11 render cannot run on your graphics card. That's what DX11 "downlevel" support is for.

So there might be a chance the engine can still run on your PC.

However, at this moment it is way too early to think about that. On the one hand, it will take a while before you get your hands on NX, so until then you might have a new graphics card anyway. On the other hand, many things aren't set in stone yet anyway, the minimum requirements being one of those. If there is indeed large demand for older hardware, we might look into that, but right now it has no priority for us, as it would be a waste of time at this point.

posted on September 17th, 2014, 9:58 am

in a couple years you'll probably find that your gtx 275 limits you in nearly every recent game, not just FO.

True dat, I only could get medium quality settings in both current-gen games I've played this year. I considered getting a new card for christmas already, but as rarely as I actually play something this graphically intensive...

It's comforting to know it might still run, and that you're not yet set on those things.
As for demand of older hardware support, FO right now can be pretty demanding - if you turn up the settings. With the A2 basis I imagine backward compatibility was never much of an issue.

posted on September 20th, 2014, 11:42 am

So Jan gives away secrets....

ez will only support DX11 and up

...nice!

DX11 was released October '09. And I appreciate that the Dev-Team keeps up with the time.
btw: DX11 hardware is much more powerful today than in '09....and relatively cheap in comparison to '09 if you compare the performance with price.

And like JeanLucPicard already said...

"Patience is a virtue that you need if you like games mods..."

I'm like a cat on hot bricks...waiting for this mod in particular .

posted on October 8th, 2014, 7:56 pm

I can't wait for this-it would be great...

posted on November 8th, 2014, 2:20 am

Please show Us (the End-users / gamers) some Videos of what Your new ez-Engine can do / perform. You know: Seeing I S believeing.

posted on January 4th, 2015, 6:35 pm

Will ezEngine be 64 bit? Will it make use of technologies like Mantle?

Any advice on the software environment needed to compile the code? Microsoft etc... and the versions?

I'm looking forward to the sweet agony this is going to pull from me over the next couple of years.

We should all be making plans for our Axanar DLC sometime in 2020.

posted on January 11th, 2015, 10:28 pm

ez currently compiles both in 32 and 64 Bit. We might drop official 32 Bit support at some point, but it actually doesn't take any extra effort.

Mantle and DX12 are theoretically possible, but right now it doesn't make sense putting any work in that. DX11 will be sufficient for a looong time.

Not sure why you want to know details about how to work with the engine, you can just download it and try it out. But generally we mostly work on Windows 7 or 8 with Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, but it also compiles on Linux and MacOS with GCC and Clang. We use CMake as a build system and Qt5 for UI code.

Since everybody is asking for stuff to see, this is the application that I currently use for testing new features:

Test.png (2.38 KiB) Viewed 883 times

Pretty boring, right? It's a rotating pyramid in wireframe and it changes color when a key is pressed. At least that's what it currently does. I use this to test whether data gets correctly uploaded to the GPU, whether rendering state changes work as expected, whether shader compilation and the use of different shader permutations work correctly, whether runtime-reloading of resources (textures, shaders) works, and I used it to test texturing before (obviously not at the moment).

Such a simple test case is already enough to test the features that I am currently working on. Another guy is working on providing infrastructure for more complicated scenes, but even his test cases don't look very impressive, because we neither have great content, nor need it for development.

There is actually A LOT going on behind the scenes (it is a complex engine), but the result that you see on screen is something even a beginner could program in few hours. That is why we really don't like showing any "results" at the moment, because it does not represent in any way, what the technology is capable of.

Anyway, that's the latest news.

posted on January 11th, 2015, 11:41 pm

Thanks for the news, Jan.

ez currently compiles both in 32 and 64 Bit. We might drop official 32 Bit support at some point, but it actually doesn't take any extra effort.

64 bit support is nice. A lot of games don't run as well as they could because they're only 32 bit for PS3 and 360 compatibility so actually being able to make use of my 64 bit OS will be fun.

Not sure why you want to know details about how to work with the engine, you can just download it and try it out. But generally we mostly work on Windows 7 or 8 with Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, but it also compiles on Linux and MacOS with GCC and Clang. We use CMake as a build system and Qt5 for UI code.

So, does that mean that even if FO itself doesn't officially support Linux I could compile the ezEngine myself and copy the relevant files from a Windows install, either out of the Wine directory or the Program Files folder on my Windows partition?

Once again, thanks for the news and good luck with the rest of the project.

posted on January 12th, 2015, 12:26 pm

So, does that mean that even if FO itself doesn't officially support Linux I could compile the ezEngine myself and copy the relevant files from a Windows install, either out of the Wine directory or the Program Files folder on my Windows partition?:

That will not be possible.

Think of the engine as a bag full of tools. Think of the game as something that you want to build. The better the tools are, the easier it is to build things with them. The Fleetops guys are building their own game, for which they use our tools. They do write a lot of code on their end, it is not only content creation and game design, they need to program a lot of stuff as well.

So what you can download is the engine, the tools, with which you could make your own game. You do not get the source code for the Fleetops game, however, unless the Fleetops team decides to release that as well. I doubt that they do that, though, it would make cheating too easy.