S2ENGINE HD News

Hi to all,

[h2]PREAMBLE[/h2]
When AMD published their new OpenGL drivers in 2021 the performance imrpovement of S2engine on Radeon cards was really impressive.
AMD OpenGL drivers now are much much much more performant that NVIDIA ones (even if NVIDIA stability remained unsurpassed), that still keep a big overhead.
From my point of view this is a shame: NVIDIA cards are the most performant and widespread cards on the market and I really don't want S2engine to underperform on those cards.
So,
In the last month I've worked on a new rendering system to reduce the gap between AMD and NVIDIA driver performances.

[h2]AZDO[/h2]
Today I'm proud to announce that I've just closed the hard part of the development of a new rendering system based on some AZDO (Approaching Zero Driver Overhead) functions that will improve about 30%-45% the performances on NVIDIA cards by reducing the driver overhead!

Results of the tests I've done on some s2engine demos are really impressive.

Following are OLD / NEW comparison screenshots of the Building Generator DLC city level,
The reference system specs are:
CPU - INTEL i5 8600K
GPU - NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB
RAM - 16GB



Here, instead, are come comparison screenshots related to the UPCOMING New Cementery Pack, on the same reference system:


Finally are some comparison screenshots in HELLSEED (on the same reference system):


As you can see from these screenshots the improvements are HUGE.
The AZDO way seems to be the right way for an incredible performance evolution of the engine, so I'll continue to develop it by including all the remaining most recent AZDO functions in future.

[h2]ABOUT RADEONS[/h2]
As said AMD OpenGL drivers are today very very performant (in some cases they are still faster than NVIDIA ones) and they seems to work fine with and without AZDO, so the new rendering system seems to produce no improvement.
This conclusion could be not completely true due to the fact that my AMD reference system is very limited in graphics card (I use an old and poor RX550), so with a more performant and modern system results could change.
SO LET ME KNOW if you notice improvement on your RADEON card when the new update will be public.

For now it's all,
Stay Tuned,
PROFENIX STUDIO

[h2]RELEASE NOTES[/h2]

• BUGFIX: EasyGamePack Platforms do not work after latest updates
  
• BUGFIX: Wrong Shapes scaling in Prefab viewport
  
• BUGFIX: EasyGamePack Mission objects do not run GameMachines
  
• Added persistentState parameter to GUI Object
  
• Added ClampVec3 gameMachine action
  
• Added "CheckPointFile" parameter to MissionTimer, MissionSwitch and MissionCounter class objects in EasyGamePack
  
• Now the discrete graphics card is selected in the case of double card (discrete + integrated) systems (to verify!)
  
• Added parameter "AlignToCamera" into ParticleSystem object class
  
• Huge rework on the AudioDevice subsystem that improves playable sound sources usage avoiding frequent glitches when there are too many looping audio sources in the scene
  
• Recompiled OpenAL Soft audio library to make it to read local configuration (alsoft.ini)
  
• BUGFIX: Global mono sound sources flickering and right-left chopping
  
• LEAKFIX: Huge leak in the activation cache that waste memory when the game simulation restarts.
  
• BUGFIX: level related DLLs are not copied int the destination folder if you publish the game without loading any level into the editor
  

Enjoy and stay tuned
PROFENIX STUDIO

[h2]RELEASE NOTES[/h2]

• "More..." button in Learn section in S2Launcher now open the youtube channel directly in to the default browser
  
• BUGFIX: some message boxes that haven't the "not show" checkbox make engine to crash
  
• BUGFIX: Not all object gamemachines references are showed when click "ShowReferences" in the object dropdown menu
  
• BUGFIX: Messages and Events are also sent to non-active/non-static/non-ai objects
  

Enjoy and stay tuned,
PROFENIX STUDIO

Hi,

Today I've updated S2ENGINE HD 2023.2 to 2023.2.1 version (minor update).
It fixes some bugs and introduce the "mouse displace normalization" that gives more stability to camera movements when using mouse.

[h2]RELEASE NOTES:[/h2]

• Added checkbox "don't show again" into the message boxes
  
• BUGFIX: when loading level in sequence sometimes texture streaming doesn't start
  
• Improved physics ragdoll to keyframe animation transition
  
• Added Frametime cap engine parameter
  
• BUGFIX: sometimes could happen that streamed texture data info (width, height, format, mipmaps, etc..) isn't loaded corretly, this causes wrong texture visualization and sometimes also system crash.
  
• Added ErrorLevel parameter in engine gonfiguration
  
• Now verbose, warning and error logs have levels
  
• BUGFIX: GetHitInfo and RayCastSync do not return the right object output parameter
  
• Haunted House assets and scene FIX
  
• Normalized mouse displacement (camera mouse movement now is independent from framerate)
  
• BUGFIX: Prefabs reset in the Game Tab of project configuration doesn't work
  
• BUGFIX: NextCutscene parameter in the track editor can not be reset
  
• LEAKFIX: another GPU level-to-level leak fixed
  
• Now, if there isn't a latest-opened scene, NewScene dialog shows the latest modified scene in time order
  
• BUGFIX: wrong project path string computation when creating a new project causes browsers to explore also behind the project root folder.
  
• BUGFIX: if a new project folder is chosen to be in the Device root folder (C:\\, D:\\, etc...) the project is not created
  

Enjoy and stay tuned,
PROFENIX STUDIO

Hi,

After about a month on Patreon for beta testing we have finally released the new S2ENGINE HD 2023.2 version for all on Steam.

[h2]NEW PLAYERSTART SYSTEM[/h2]
The biggest new thing in this version id the PlayerStart system.
Now you can define prefabs for player and game GUI in the project configuration and then use them in every level of your game, without redefine player and gui every time you create a new levelin the project.
Simply PlayerStart object in the level and it automatically instantiate the player and gui prefabs defined in the project configuration.

[h2]LAUNCHER VER 1.4[/h2]
The new launcher introduces a new simple Wizard for project creation.

[h2]LOADING SCREEN[/h2]
In this version it is finally possible to edit the loading screen using the GUI editor and GameMachine.
This means that, if you want, you can avoid to use s2script for create loading screens and their logic.

[h2]IMPROVED TEXTURE STREAMING[/h2]
We have improved a lot the texture streamer.
In the previous version there were a lot of problems that caused leaks in GPU and CPU memoery that, de facto, make texture streaming completely unuseful.
In this version all these problems have been fixed and now the texture streaming is effective and helps a lot in reducing the GPU memory consumption while keeping the best quality possible.

Following are the complete
[h2]RELEASE NOTES:[/h2]

• Now, sceneviewport automatically resize when exiting from fullscreen game simulation
  
• BUG FIXED: Player hand weapons aren't saved well when the game data is saved in easy game pack, often engine crashes.
  
• BUG FIXED: Easy Game Pack radar script includes player among enemies tags
  
• Implemeted player start system
  
• Added "StartMenu" and "progress" prefabs for speeding-up main menu level creation and loading progress screen creation
  
• Added "startLevel" option into the "startmenu" GameMachine
  
• Now it is possible to use GUI editor and GameMachine to create the loading screen (no more scripts needed)
  
• Improved alpha hashed lod transitions when material LOD is set on auto
  
• Increased new project creation speed by more than 40%
  
• Increased stability and speed of the Resource Table Generation (GenerateResourceTable tool).
  
• Improved decals with multiply material in order to prevent texture projection artifacts due to acute angles
  
• Updated Launcher to version 1.4:
  
• New Wizard assisted procedure for the creation of a new Project
  
• Now Video tutorials are directly opened on youtube in the predefined browser (for maximum compatibility with google youtube service).
  
• BUG FIXED: Crash after loading a scene when, in the saved scene, mission or gameScore objects were added before the GUIObject, or when after placing mission, gameScore and GUIObject, the GUIOBject was deleted and re-inserted.
  
• BUG FIXED: When saving a scene, if editor process looses focus (i.e. you use another program), saving operation is repeated in an infinite loop.
  
• Now, when editor looses focus process is put in sleep state for saving system resources consumption.
  
  
• BUG FIXED: On some systems in 4k resolution occlusion culling fails hiding objects that should be visible.
  
• Fixed "OldBoat" model to work with rigid bodies.
  
• Improved Third Person Basic Player Prefab for avoiding flickering when moving
  
• Improved Third Person Basic Player GameMachine to make him to maintain straight trajectory when turning back.
  
• Project settings are saved when projectSettings dialog is closed with ok button (no more only when project is saved)
  
• Now it is possible to execute the gameMachine Quit action (executed for example by a game menu exit button) without making the editor to quit!
  
  
• Increased Zoom factor in GameMachine Graph Viewport
  
• Added Parameter "PersistentState" into Objects, useful for keeping their state across different game levels
  
  
• Added New "LoadSceneTrigger" object class
  
• Added New "LoadSceneSwitch" object class
  
• Now "StartOpened" parameter in Swicthes opens automatically the Switch when it is instanced (in previous version the switch only changed state flag BUT this was not reflected on the real switch state)
  
• Added possibility to write text into object_list, widget_list, node_list type param boxes
  
• Added new parameter refract_fresnel into Materials
  
• Improved Texture streaming system
  
• BUGFIX: Texture streaming produced memory leak on GPU side
  
• BUGFIX: Level Closing produced memory leak on CPU and GPU side
  
• Added Terrain delete option into main menu edit->terrain submenu
  
  
• Now it is possible to create a game level in a folder different from the root
  
• BUGFIX: When exporting an asset the engine crashes after chosen the destination folder
  

[h2]CONCLUSIONS[/h2]
During the day we'll update the manual and public a couple of new youtube shorts as tutorial for showing some new functionalities.

Enjoy and Stay tuned,
PROFENIX STUDIO