Xenko Game Engine 2.0 released

http://xenko.com/blog/release-xenko-2-0-0/

by bluesilver07 • 9 years ago

74 75 9 years ago

xenko.com

Zekio• 9 years ago

ohh you can use C# 7 features, gotta play around with it now

zimbatm• 9 years ago

How is this compared to Unity?

hesdeadjim• 9 years ago

Frankly any comparison is going to be superficial unless the comparison is done by a person who has actually shipped a non-trivial game on both engines.

So many of the problems you run into making a game on Unity, Unreal, etc come down to the out-of-the-ordinary requirements of your game and the inevitable peculiarities of the engine itself. Part of becoming an "expert" in building games on a third party engine is knowing where the pain points lie, where you should absolutely not fight The Way It's Done, and what bugs remain unfixed for years on end (Unity asset bundle system, looking at you).

Edit: My point being that unless you know the needs of your particular game and have familiarity with a candidate engine, it will be very difficult to determine if your choice is "best" or not.

vvanders• 9 years ago

As someone who's been through the pain of making UE3 fit for a game it wasn't built for that's one the best nuanced answers I've seen on the subject.

Pica_soO• 9 years ago

Reminds me of all the "Lets make a battlezone like shooter"-gamedevs who dropped by on the Spring-Engines dev site. And yes, you are perfectly capable to do that. And no, it wont work well- for the reason, a RTS-Engin has a built in lower physical Simulationframe update- and is allowed to act "slower" to commands then a shooter. So, if you want that shooter to happen- engine rewrite it is.

drawkbox• 9 years ago

They'll be competing similar to Shiva Engine, it will be a mindshare battle as they aren't the first Unity competitor.

Unity is the most known and jobs and markets have sprung up around it as well as a massive asset store now exists, it also has many integrations such as apis and tools that take years to acquire.

Unreal and Epic have Tencent money and are on the way.

The OSS side of this engine is pretty interesting. Will be fun to have another competitor in this area. Xenko looks like a direct Unity competitor even down the the pricing and tiers. The big challenge is the community, asset stores and launched titles under the engine. Branding is important as well, to me Shiva and Xenko are forgettable brands, Unity and Unreal are set in minds.

rwmj2• 9 years ago

Always tell me what the product is in the first sentence or two.

the_duke• 9 years ago

Front page:

Next-Level C# Game Engine
Xenko is an open-source C# game engine designed for the future of gaming. It comes with a full toolchain and is especially well suited to create realistic games but allows you much more!

rwmj2• 9 years ago

But not on this page, which happens to be the first page I've ever read on this project.

The Economist is a good example here. In every article, every time a new name or topic is introduced, it will provide a few words describing the person/thing. An example taken from the first sentence of the first article I opened: "Much of the language used by Mike Pence, America’s vice-president, [...]"

ensignavenger2• 9 years ago

It is not actually open source, though- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14199899

je42• 9 years ago

https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/graphs/contributors

are they stopping with development?

swsieber• 9 years ago

I think they are just closing the source as they make it commercial...

Edit: Oh, nevermind - on the home page they explicitly say that they're open source.

adrianmalacoda• 9 years ago

And by "open source" they mean a proprietary product[0] with "personal" (stripped down and highly restrictive license) and "pro" versions[1], naturally.

The old version (which is on github) is GPLv3 apparently.

[0] http://xenko.com/legal/eula/

[1] https://store-dev.xenko.com/get-xenko

binarycrusader• 9 years ago

No, not actually completely open source. In particular, you don't get editor source unless you license the pro or customer versions.

Unreal may not be open source, but having source access at all license levels continues to be incredibly attractive.

ensignavenger2• 9 years ago

They say that on the front page, but apparently they are not, from the FAQ "Currently the source code of the Game Studio is available only to Xenko Pro Plus and Custom subscribers on a corporate basis. If you would like to subscribe to Xenko Pro Plus or Custom, please contact us." and "Under the terms of the Xenko end user license agreement, you can share modified versions of Xenko in source code or binary form only to users who have the same Xenko license as you or higher. Additionally, you must include the Xenko end user license agreement at the root of the shared files."

aeorgnoieang• 9 years ago

Maybe the developers just haven't merged back into 'master' in awhile:

https://github.com/SiliconStudio/xenko/network

holmboy_• 9 years ago

Looks like they're on Gitlab

https://git.xenko.com/xenko/Xenko-Runtime

rel_ev• 9 years ago

windows.. meh

pjmlp15• 9 years ago

Congratulations on the work achieved, specially on adopting higher level languages.

The growing adoption of C# among game engines, brings me back memories of when game engines finally started to allow C++ on their source code.

emsy4• 9 years ago

Unity games are often reported to have performance issues, allegedly due to the underlying GC (or lack of understanding of it). I'd rather hope for the adoption of a less messy C++ alternative that is suitable for quasi-realtime applications. So far Jai seems to be the most serious competitor in this regard.

pjmlp15• 9 years ago

Because Unity uses a Jurassic Mono implementation with a stone age GC and JIT implementation.

By the same metrics, we should evaluate performance of C and C++ code by using benchmarks with MS-DOS C and C++ compilers, which should be about the same age.

Don't mix languages with implementation when talking about performance.

stcredzero3• 9 years ago

Unity games are often reported to have performance issues, allegedly due to the underlying GC (or lack of understanding of it).

Is there a way of running C# with reference counting?

AlexeyBrin2• 9 years ago

So far Jai seems to be the most serious competitor in this regard.

1. Jai is not even released.

2. Jai is a programming language, not a game engine.

Unity is slow because they are using an outdated C# implementation (some old Mono).

adamrezich• 9 years ago

Not to be too pedantic but I'm pretty sure he's never actually referred to it as "Jai" and everyone's only been inferring that because of the source file extensions.

pandaman9• 9 years ago

I have memories of people trying Java for the same purpose. I believe, the C# will ultimately meet the same fate. Here is why (I believe that):

Switching from C/C++ to a GC language is nothing like switching from Assembler to C/C++. We did not write Assembler because we liked it. We wrote it because we targeted 8/16-bit archs, which did not fit C/C++ memory model quite well. Because of this Assembler had huge speed and size advantage. As soon as flat memory archs became viable almost everybody dropped Assembler without regret. We lost a bit of performance (which could have been easily regained by rewriting inner loops in Assembler) in exchange of reusable, portable code, type system and terse program texts. These allowed to write much more complex games by engaging bigger teams who could sensibly collaborate over a much bigger project in C/C++.

What is the transition to GC from C++? You sacrifice a lot of performance for freedom from managing memory. I don't know about other people but having shipped few AAA games my only concern was fitting shit into available memory (which GC does not help, to say the least). You allocate memory on load. If you load multiple levels you nuke the previous level's memory. If you stream you do the same but your "levels" are now "segments" in a pool. Of course, if you want to go full-GC and allocate your structures byte by byte, uint32_t by uint32_t - be my guest, not sure how you plan to compete but, hey, load times (same as frame rate) are not that important as they say on the internet :) Nevertheless, as soon as 32-bit targets become completely obsolete people will find out that you can pre-allocate everything off-line in 64-bit so all you will have to do at run-time is map/unmap pages (which GC won't help either). In conclusion: one dropped performance on the floor (due to cache issues, SIMD issues, off-line vs JIT quality issues etc) and picked up the solution to the problem one should not have had in the first place.

caseymarquis• 9 years ago

Maybe Nim would be a good GC included C++ replacement then? Its GC can reliably be constrained to a maximum run time of 2ms, and it has strong macro support.

nonsince3• 9 years ago

C# is, among GC languages, particularly bloated with regards to memory. There is huge amounts of runtime type information (including stringified versions of everything) and you have close to no control over memory management without hooking into ugly APIs. I wish that Swift or Rust had been usable early enough to get swept up in the hype train so that we could avoid this crap. Also, it would mean I didn't have to use OOP to write games.

pjmlp15• 9 years ago

Java only failed because Sun didn't care enough for pushing it into game developers after their initial presentations. Actually they didn't care for any other scenario that wasn't JEE, in terms of putting resources into it.

Switching from Assembly into C, Pascal, Modula-2, QuickBasic was mostly an amateur thing until SDKs started to be based on C.

Same with C++, we were the outliers until console vendors started pushing C++ into devs. See Mike Acton's talks about about how he enjoyed having been forced to move from C into C++.

The thing with GC is not the freedom to manage memory, you still need to take care about how memory is managed. What one gets is type safety and an uniform way to manage memory across libraries.

You know exactly who is responsible for releasing it, there are no double deallocations, releasing invalid addresses, or having to deal with library specific smart pointers (CPtr, QSmartPtr, unique_ptr, my_in-house_ptr, ...).

due to cache issues, SIMD issues, off-line vs JIT quality issues etc

Having a GC doesn't preclude lack of support for cache handling or SIMD.

Many GC based languages have such support and actually C# 7 with Microsoft's toolchain (not Unity's one) does offer such features, even if they can still be improved.

As for JIT quality, it is no different from any other compiler, otherwise as I referred, why not discuss C performance using MS-DOS compiler's benchmarks.

golergka2• 9 years ago

You're forgetting that this transition takes place in game engines: so the critical path is still mostly C++, while C# is responsible for game logic and most of it is run on callbacks, not in the update loop.

Same goes for memory: textures and other assets are managed through the engine; C# only contains game logic data and handles to the assets.

animal531• 9 years ago

I was once working on a solo indie game using C# with OpenGL bindings. If you create it along the normal program lines of object instantiate/use/destroy (and repeat), then you're soon going to run into serious issues.

At the time I had many issues with the GC, Large Object Heap and fragmentation (although this had still been in a much older .NET version).

For a game project, both for speed and memory, you want as much as possible to be pre-allocated (and all at once). During run-time you want as few objects as possible being instantiated, that way you save cycles on both the objects, and eventually on the GC. Of course it's not always that easy.

After that it depends on your targets, you'll never fit a Unity C# game as tightly into any target as a native app, but it's a trade-off that's worth making in many cases.

maccard• 9 years ago

In UE4 everything is garbage collected. Lots of high performance, AAA games using it.

bhewes• 9 years ago

Cool to see Silicon Studio came out of SGI Japan.

imaginenore• 9 years ago

If I only had time to learn another game engine. But I'd rather spend it making games with Unreal or Unity, and I doubt Xenko has something important they don't.

Xenko Game Engine 2.0 released

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