Existence Engine / News: Recent posts

The team is delighted to see that so many have downloaded the latest tech demo. I'm sure the source code proved handy to a lot of coders. The second Existence 2.0 tech demo is coming along nicely, with an anvanced portal system as well as OpenAL audio. The rendering speed has increased and the code has been cleaned up. In order to improve the flexibility of the engine, all code concerning game elements has been seperated and put in a seperate module. When we feel good about the tech demo, we will publish it together with the source code. It will be bigger, better and more audible then the last demo, so keep watching this project.

The first tech demo of the new engine can be downloaded from the "Existence Engine 2.0" package. Be sure to read the readme text file.

As can be seen from the new screenshots, a new demo is being produced using the Existence 2.0 engine. The demo is built for the Linux and Windows platform and has the source code included.

After the release of Build 28, our first real game demo, it became clear that the current code base isn't flexible enough to add new technology. Therefore, it has been decided to make a fresh start by coding a new engine en creating a new website. At the moment, the new engine can already demonstrate stencil shadowing and bumpmapping. As with the original project, the source will be released under the GNU GPL.

Work on the new SDK is going great. OggVorbis streaming and GUI scripts have been added. The SDK will also ship with documentation about the engine, editing and the source. Of course, the complete source will be included. There's also finally support for gamma corrections and vsync, which improve image quality. At the same time, a new demo is being developed which will showcase the new features.

Progress on the new Build is going fast. The OGL driver has been rewritten in C++ making it more flexible and stable.

Today, I started implementing sound into the engine using OpenAL. The first version of the soundsystem is running now and works fine. I've got an issue with the OggVorbis decoder though, the dll keeps crashing. I hope to finalize the soundsystem soon.

I've browsed through the Doom3 SDK from ID today and I must say I am really impressed. They managed to create a really clear interface to the engine written in spotless C++. I hope to learn a bit of it and write better interfaces between the core program and DLL's on the Existence Engine (which is needed very badly).

The Summary page listed Build 19 as the latest file release. This is not true, Build 27 is the latest. By manually changing the release dates, I've corrected this error. For those who downloaded Build 19, please download Build 27 because it's superiour.

The current build of the source code is on CVS. I will update it as often as possible. For those wo want to have data files to test the binairies, please mail me.

The old project website has been uploaded to SourceForge. It will be used untill we have a new one.

Today, I finally uploaded all the files to SourceForge. The files are organized in Build numbers according to their age. The source code of each Build is available and some builds have some Tech Demo's, ready to play. If you want to start editing with the engine, download the Build 27 SDK which contains everything you'll need.

The Existence Engine is going Open Source today. In the next few days, a website and downloadable demo's will be added to SourceForge. We hope that this project will be a success, now that we've moved to SourceForge. And of course, we hope that we can contribute to the community by adding this project to the long Open Source list.

Silencer,
Founder of the Existence Engine