Development Blog

Update:

My vision is to have Ultra Engine work like Visual Studio.
Create a new project and it's already a running executable.
Write a Story and let the game shape up.
Fire up the Editor and drag & drop stuff into your world.
Watch in real-time how your game lives.
Publish the game with the click of a button.

This is looking really good.  I used the Leadwerks editor the other day and realised how much I missed it.  Ultra is going to be great!

Don't forget to add animation support!

 

Animation is done with a 3D texture. When more than one texture layer exists, as in 3D textures and cube maps, a layer selector appears that lets you select the layer to view.

Here's another shot showing how you can view any mipmap level.

Unrelated, but do you plan to add mip maps streaming from disk depending on distance?

5 minutes ago, Genebris said:

Unrelated, but do you plan to add mip maps streaming from disk depending on distance?

What would that be used for?

Saving up RAM. It clears 5GB for me in Unity. I have 9 GB of textures in a scene and with a checkbox tick I get just 4 GB, no visual impact.

RAM or VRAM? Textures should not consume any system memory.

Well, I have 3GB of VRAM so 4 or 9 GB can only fit if RAM is used alongside. I'm pretty sure that system works for both. They call it "GPU memory" and to my layman understanding it's not only VRAM. Either way, the total size of textures in memory profiler becomes exactly what I type in the system. That project only runs due to that system.

I believe most graphics drivers will automatically move textures that haven't been used in a while into "virtual memory", i.e. they write it to a file to unload it from VRAM. There is no good reason to keep texture data in system memory, and Ultra doesn't ever do that.

I'll keep this in mind and we can revisit it if it will make an improvement.

glTF model:

I've got embedded assets displaying now. You can open a material or texture that is packed into a model file, view, and modify it. glTF and OBJ supports embedded materials, glTF supports embedded textures, and there are some other obscure formats like Quake MDL that do this as well.

Embedded files show their name in square brackets and link back to the file they are embedded in. You can use this to modify materials embedded in a glTF, or use it to extract materials and textures from a model and save them as a standalone file.

No sliders for intensity, roughness and metalness? Also interested to see how the tab system can be updated to support closing and reorganizing.

Everything looks good, it's going to get really exciting once the map tools start to be made.

 

I will add sliders. Right now I am trying to get the basic structure down. Now using a property grid in the side panel. This lets me fit more stuff into the interface, and it also will make it easy to add new functionality with an extension. For example, you could add a "Quake Texture" group for files loaded from a Quake WAD package, and add special Quake-specific properties to be edited there.

Lots of model stats. Some of this is good for quickly spotting problems. For example, if you see a model that uses 100 meshes you probably want to optimize that.

This shows how an extension can be written that adds custom data to models and other asset files.

If I break off the asset browser and asset manager, that might be a decent standalone app that can be released first, before the full editor. That would allow me to get a visual tool out to the people faster, and get started testing it sooner.

The last major stepping stone to work out will be to figure out how file saving in packages is supposed to work. I think having that will be extremely useful though, especially for people making mods for other games.

I would use 7zip's source code and integrate it into the engine.

I'm using zlib / minizip. There's a lot of details. Zip files aren't actually designed to allow deletion of a single file. You can only create a new archive, and copy every existing file into the new archive, minus the one you wanted to delete.