Behind the scenes: ezEngine

posted on January 12th, 2015, 8:26 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.

Okay. I wasn't sure because of the Spring Engine, though I suppose that Spring is more of a barebones game meant for modding, based on what you're saying.

posted on September 23rd, 2015, 11:42 am

Hello Dev's

Obviously this is a super big task to move everything to a new engine. May have already been asked, but is there a rough idea for a release date on this?

Also, with the issues on copy right and all that stuff, what the plan with raising awareness? It would be great to develop a larger community but how could this be achieved without it becoming too known? No one likes a law suit

Pay day end of month... donation will be on its way

posted on September 23rd, 2015, 4:41 pm

Welcome to the forums Patawan

We're not in the habit of claiming release dates - we've made good progress and we'll continue to do so

We don't have any copyright issues as far as we know: CBS is ok with us releasing a game with Star Trek IP, provided it is free, as Fleet Operations always will be.

posted on June 5th, 2016, 10:48 pm

I keep imagining star trek armada in the unreal engine.

posted on June 5th, 2016, 11:04 pm

Patawan Said "what the plan with raising awareness? It would be great to develop a larger community but how could this be achieved without it becoming too known? No one likes a law suit"

Dominus_Noctis gave an answer to the rest of what Patawan asked but this any chance Dominus_Noctis may answer this?

posted on June 6th, 2016, 8:45 pm

"Awareness", blogs, etc all fall into promotion, and the team has been very consistent in their attitude that they won't spend time on that until they can do it with screenshots.

posted on June 10th, 2016, 10:08 pm

MadHatter

I not 100% sure he was just thinking of NX just Fleet Ops as a whole as was i.

Maybe a Dev can pop us a line or 2 so we can see what they have to say on this would be kind of nice ok if not as i'm sure you working hard on NX or would hope

posted on June 11th, 2016, 7:05 am

It should be possible to keep an eye on EZEngine's development on GitHub (https://github.com/ezEngine). Most recent commit there is March 28th.

posted on June 11th, 2016, 8:31 am

Fortunately the GitHub repository is not representative of the ezEngine development. We use a Subversion repository for development and only synchronize to GitHub very rarely. The last commit was a very small bugfix, which was merged out of order, because someone who uses ez for another side project required that to be on GitHub. The last large commit was in October and the amount of work done since then is actually pretty amazing.

We are actually more active in recent months than ever. We typically have more than 2 commits every single day. Of course a lot is small changes and bugfixes here and there, but larger improvements are regular as well.

Last week we finished a crucial piece that was holding us back from working on our rendering code. Quite a bit of code for advanced lighting effects had already been written, but could not be properly tested. Now that this in place I hope we will get the renderer into a presentable state within the next weeks or few months. Since NX will use our renderer, that directly affects Fleetops.

Otherwise we have done a PhysX integration that is now pretty solid. At some point NX may use PhysX for client side effects, and for that the integration is more than good enough (not so complicated physics in space games, as in a shooter).

We also started on an Fmod integration, which ez will use for sound. It's working, but still in a prototyping stage.

Finally we are currently doing some game coding ourselves, as well, just for the fun of it. This has a very positive effect on the engine, because by actually using it to try to achieve certain things, we have already found a number of issues and fixed them, that NX would probably have run into at some point, as well.
For instance, we added functionality to easily create lists of assets that should be streamed in the background after the game has started, such that when certain actions occur, the data is available and the game will not stall to load it on demand.
This will help to get short loading times, but still a smooth experience throughout the game.

All in all the engine is very robust and easy to use. I'm quite happy with the current state, but of course there is still a lot of hard work ahead.

posted on June 25th, 2016, 6:02 am

I'm thrilled to hear that you guys are making progress!

Two questions:

1. Is the EzEngine team planning on giving the engine full GNU/Linux support? Will EzEngine games be able to run on Linux?
2. Will GNU/Linux users running AMD cards with the open-source drivers have any issues running games based upon EzEngine?

posted on June 26th, 2016, 7:03 pm

The core infrastructure is ported to Linux and Mac. Generally one could make games with ez for those platforms and it is a long term goal for the engine to be fully cross platform. However some higher level functionality is currently only implemented on Windows. Most notably our rendering is all DirectX 11 at this time and that won't change in the foreseeable future.

As such I do not think that a Mac or Linux port is feasible any time soon. Supporting one platform is already a huge amount of work, in my opinion it is best for everyone, if nx is done well on one platform, rather than trying to cater to everyone and have even more work, that doesn't make the game itself better in any way. Afaik that is the nx team's stance on this as well, so expect it to be Windows only.

posted on June 27th, 2016, 6:16 am

That seems like the best way to do things. As a Linux user (who would be more than willing to install Windows to play NX), I had to ask. Keep up the good work, everybody.

posted on July 7th, 2016, 6:59 pm

Is it done yet....


Just kidding it's been a while y'all but I've missed playing FO can't wait to play again.

posted on July 14th, 2016, 2:50 pm

What can I do to help NX?

posted on July 14th, 2016, 3:30 pm

Give them a team of 200 people and lots of money hehe well let hope they let you help in some way might help move it along