I’m making a Unity 3D-like game engine

Looks neat!

I wish I could make an engine from scratch for funsies, but my skills aren't there yet.

 

Yes. This explains why we expect a lot from 500 men and more.

 

Good luck with the engine! I hope it'll have Mono (or at least Lua) integrated for those who don't like C++. Actually usage of C# is what brought me originally to Unity. If another engine comes along that offers that and has lenient license terms (no royalties for example), I'll gladly buy into it.

 

Yep, it supports C# using Mono 4.4 .

 

C# 6 from what i have seen : )

 

Regarding the website: I'm slowly working on it, but very busy with adding all the other engine features and keeping up with my schedule. I'll try to get it up sooner!

Thanks for the feedback.

 

could use https://pages.github.com/ for starters?

 

I thought about it. I think the main advantage of the webpage at this point would be to gather the community, at minimum I'd like a way to post news, host docs and have a forum and possibly a wiki. It's not a big job but regardless I have no time for it at the moment. Hopefully soon.

 

Maybe that could be a good way for someone to contribute?
Sadly i have no experience of webdesign.

 

So... we are interested in literally ANYTHING other than actual, real game dev.

 

In the mean time, feel free to give it a test and post any issues here:

https://github.com/BearishSun/BansheeEngine/issues

 

Well in this case some people cannot make a game in Unity due to its graphics not being good enough. Maybe this new game engine will match or exceed CryEngine. Never know!

 

I'm working on the rendering pipeline, of course I'll make it as shiny as possible..!! That's what I do.. And waste a metric ton of time on the Unity forums.. *cough.!

 

I hope someone will contribute level geometry tools (CSG brushes). Maybe you could take a look at Trenchbroom Quake map editor to see how it could be done so it's fun to build with.

 

Yeah, it's been suggested and it seems we agree. Although of course no promises and with the sheer amount of stuff we have to get through, not any time soon (Unless someone kindly contributes before we get to it)..

There's a ton of stuff I want to get in the engine. ..!

 

No problemo . You have more important stuff to work out first such as import pipeline (I really would like to see it cooperating with blender in similar manner Unity does, i.e. you can simply pop in .blend file and it imports for you), API, renderer. Once it's about on par with (if not better than) Unity, level editing stuff can be added.

 

Since my original post here, engine has been updated with audio support! And not just one audio system, but two: OpenAL for those looking for a fully open source solution, and FMOD for those looking for a more professional system. Both systems support import for variety of popular file formats like OGG and FLAC, multi-channel audio, on-the-fly decompression and streams, multiple listeners for split-screen and more.

We're not exposing advanced FMOD functionality like reverb, filters or channel groups yet, but they are relatively easy to add now that there's a foundation (we're just focusing on adding the remaining critical features before moving onto the advanced stuff).

It took less than a month to implement both of those systems from scratch. I think that's a testament to how quickly an open-source project that offers a quality foundation can evolve.

Next up is skeletal animation with skinning, blend shape animation, generic script variable animation, animation editor, animation blending and additive animations. If there's time also animation compression and blend trees. The goal is to have it finished by September.

Multiple collaborators have started work on engine since my original announcement, working on various other systems (such as ShadowK here), and we're hoping to pump out even more features faster in the future.

Stay tuned!

 

Which platforms are you going to support?
I'm hoping just desktop. too many engines are becoming jack of all platforms and a master of none.

 

We're primarily focusing on desktop (Win/Mac/Linux) for now, the plan is to provide high fidelity graphics and an engine scalable enough to run large 3D worlds.

That said, we will be adding mobile platforms as well but I'm not willing to compromise desktop features for mobile. Since the engine is very modular I think we can handle having multiple separate feature sets without compromising either (e.g. different renderer for mobile), and even provide separate versions of the editor for different platforms, game types and genres if needed.

 

Could you add support for IK to animation editor?

 

IK is definitely planned, but not for September release. If I have time left spare I'll take a look though. Otherwise it will be added sometime post v1.0.

 

From what I know console (PS4 / Xbox One) is definatley on the cards at some point in the future, whatever @Bearish wants to do. Although I agree, best to get PC / Mac / Linux the best it can be first.

I have the design ready for an automated occlusion culling system based on GPU HZB occlusion / Standard HW / Frustrum etc. The plan also is to allow some intermediatary control over bounding.

I'm also going to be porting some tools over from another engine I made previously.! Which had quite an advanced rendering and lighting pipeline.

So stay tuned.

 

Wow cool.

 

I like were this is going!

Here's a UI variation I made for when the yellow becomes to much

 

This is looking really nice!

 

How long have you been working on this?? Very cool & interesting!!

 

This is impressive!

 

Over four years mostly as a side-project. It took a really long time to get the core systems ready, but now that they are things are moving much faster!

 

Super awesome.

 

Godot, Xenko ... none of them are actively used by users for PC games, they are not really taking off .
If you bring some unique features like SVOGI , water system and sky system and really good terrain tools (Gaia like) as basic features , this will attract lot of people.

After a quick test it is not usable today :
- no rotation and scale gizmos
- not possible to resize physics collision shapes with gizmos
- no camera icon and direction indicator like Unity, no Camera preview window
- no GPU particles
- no skybox system
etc ...


Anyway that's always cool to find more 3D engine choice. Good luck.

 

If you optimize/specialize this for RTS games you maybe could have a serious market for it.
None of the public game engines are deterministic in sense of all computations presenting same results on all CPU.
Studios working on RTS genre always have a super hard time dealing with that, or simply ignore and make a broken game anyway...

 

These days I'm wondering if it wouldn't be better to just write the code necessary to link Blender to your game engine so that modifying the scene in one would affect the other. I don't doubt for a minute that it would be a great deal of effort but just think of all those plugins Blender supports like the one for generating trees.

 

@zenGarden It'll all get taken care of eventually, still in the early stages at the moment.
@Ryiah, shame I don't like Blender ..

 

Will it have quick build tools like probuild to help with quick prototyping? It's looking pretty nice already

 

Open source engine coupled with an open source content creator would be nice. That said I've live with Maya.

 

Blender booleans aren't perfect and glitch out sometimes. There's really a need for a proper csg tool. As far as I know the only proper CSG tool right now is Valve Hammer.

 

If you have collision without "physics" (ala blitz3D) with frame perfect inputs that would allow me to make to make a tony hawk like game at good performance... where do I sign?

 

Wow, if there is such a plug in in the asset store, would be an insta-buy!

Would've saved months of production time!

 

there is BeSync (haven't tested though)
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/41569

 

TBH it would be a dealbreaker for most studios. As much as people say they use blender and stuff the reality of the industry is Maya & Max have way more market share, even Modo is much more widely used. If a engine had blender as the level editor it would mean over 90% of studios(Just a rough estimate, but it's pretty well educated) would not consider it.

 

Indeed like Xenko and Godot never ending updates, that will never catch with Unity or UE4, because while they are trying to improve or catch up, others 3D engines are already moving forward on next step features and tools.
If you look at Xenko forums or bug reports you will see that the only people reporting are using 2D or making small mobile games and the engine doesn't take off and this is not good because this means less people using it , so less help, less tutorials or less plugins.

If you are making a game today needing modern features (terrain, PBR, SSS, Time of Day, skybox, animations blending and tools , light probes, advanced particle editors , component system , lightmapping or Svogi , visual coding, shader editor etc .... ) you won't wait forever for these to come and you will go UE4 for example.

While if you want to make a basic 3D game or retro cartoon, than these in progress open source engines could suite some people.

 

Sorry ZenGarden, I don't believe I really understand your point? All the features you're listing aren't particularily difficult to implement by themselves. What is difficult is having a core foundation that's flexible yet extremely performant to build your features atop of. Then making it simple for users, simple yet powerful is a difficult mix..

As for a Material Editor / VS tools, yeah they do take a lot of time. Although we could go down the path of Uber Shader types (which takes care of pretty much all modern tech) like CE and one can argue that component based C# is so relatively simple to use that a VS node editor isn't required. Not saying it'll never happen, but there are far more important things to sort out first.

Let's take some smaller examples, in UE the "skybox" is just a sphere which you could map it and do now. "SSS" is just a shader option, which again anyone could do with applicable shader knowledge. Again not saying we won't eventually do it for you.

In terms of outright features (in the same vein as you're talking about), there isn't anything at the moment on the same stratosphere as UE. Although some find it difficult to use, so I don't believe we have to outright beat them just not fall too far behind.

It might be a good idea to port a demo version of the game I'm working on, that requires all these features (and more) then actively develop based upon that.

 

I don't know anything about shader coding like many people, so basic PBR , SSS, water, ice, multi blending materail and vertex painter and all top notch full screen effects for example are needed out of the box.
So we don't know how to implement all missing tools and features.
Should each of us spend years learning how shaders , post effects work , and spend years making the missing tools ?
The free time we will be better employed in making a game with a ready to go engine, than making tools or shaders that does not interest us i think.

THis is the main point for lot of solo indies. We need all possible tools, all possible features already implemented, as we should only make the game content and code the gameplay.
Why waiting years for missing featuresfeatures that are already all in one in UE4 for example ? So let's tart making the game instead.

Anyway, i understand you are a tech guy that know deeply 3D engines tech and some open source engine would suit you i think, but you know, a majority of solo indies are not tech gurus.

 

Again, I'm not saying they won't be put in there (by us). What I am saying is due to ease of use / flexibility compared to UE, it may be a good option for many. Unity doesn't have anywhere near the tools / features of UE and people still seem to like it .. So it appears as long as we get a major portion of it in by our release date, things should be good.!

Luckily most of what you're asking for isn't too hard for us to put in (well some of it).. So hopefully we can move at a relatively swift pace.

I don't believe the project is a dead loss straight out the gate.

 

Maybe this could be like a free alternative, like the gimp or apache open office. At this point all I need is something to import and organize assets and some way of scripting things. I don't use the majority of Unity's features, for lack of need primarily. I get what they're there for. Just don't need 'em.

 

@zenGarden By the time Banshee is version 1.0 we hope to have a set of features that will satisfy a large majority of developers, both indie and otherwise. And we'll continue adding new features and tools as development progresses.

We won't have a feature set as the mentioned proprietary engines straight out of the gate. But because Banshee was built with a high quality and flexible foundation, it means we can add new features and systems more easily. Its code is also simpler to learn and modify, meaning it is more accessible to developers wanting to enhance the engine with new features. Obviously the fact that it's open-source and free should also be a big plus.

Both Xenko and Godot are mainly aimed for smaller games, which is why most of them are used for it. Godot is a single-threaded engine running OpenGL 3, and Xenko is an engine written in C# (which IMHO will never be good enough for larger games). This is aside from other various minor quirks I have with them.

I think advantages of Banshee over Unity are obvious, primarily it providing source code so you can customize it (which I feel is important for many developers making anything but simpler games), and it being open source and free. There are also various little tweaks everywhere that hopefully make it better in other ways as well.

And the advantage over UE4 is that it's easier to use, learn and modify. They've made strides to improve their usability but it's still nowhere close to Unity. Similar thing occurs when digging into UE4 code, it's very beastly and complex, making it hard to enhance and modify in a significant manner, which puts away a lot of people.

If none of those advantages sound good to you, feel free to stick with your current solution, and come back to Banshee after we had time to add some more advanced tools and polish

 

For some people, not for the majority of people that needs features and tools out of the box to start making a game.
Perhaps within some months Banshee will got more and more plugins or features than it could become quickly a viable solution for people needing features out of the box.

I agree, Xenko is a mess to install with lot of pre requisites and it took hours ot install, this is strange, while Banshee i just dezip and run the editor.
About adding things to Banshee in a easy way, i don't have tested, but i'll try and see how it goes , only for testing purpose i don't intend to code missing tools or features.
If you make it very accessible and very easy to use and add plugins, indeed it could become popular quickly.


I have a list of what i would expect from a 3D engine to sonsider using it :
- Some TPS and FPS demo with AI
- FBX animations import
- Animation tools like UE4 or Unity
- Navigation baking and nav agents like Unity
- terrain tool with grass and trees mass placement
- vegetation wind shader
- water shader and tool
- PBR and SSS shaders
- common post process full screen shaders
- particle GPU and editor
- Skybox and HDR
- easy to use physics components
- C# scripts components tied to 3D objects (like Unity)
- complete GUI and designer
- collision layers and events


For now the most important that would help Banshee taking off :
- a complete site with sub forums
- plugins repository download and share
- roadmap for the next months
- request forum with voting system
- bug correction with priority voting and blocking importance

Good luck.

 

The reason I'm doing this is, it's an ample opportunity to build my game upon a decent framework without having to build an engine from scratch.. Because it was simply taking too much time, the foundations are strong in this project and pretty much everything you're talking about I will require (plus much more)..

The amount of tools / features an openworld Sci-Fi TPS / FPS is going to require will be pretty vast and performance will need to be top tier.

So I'll make it and then re-introduce it back into the engine once it has been cleaned up (or label it experimental).

I'm even prepared to release a small portion of it to use as a template (eventually), we'll get there and I hope it will turn out to be a decent alternative at the time of release.

Thanks for the feedback, it'll be essential going forward.

 

I just played around with the 0.3.0 build and I feel like this engine really has potential. It would be awesome to finally have an open source engine that's focused on 3D games which is as intuitive as Unity. I kind of like Godot, but it is focused on making 2D games.

I was able to place some objects, attach a script to the camera and make the camera move in a few moments without having to look up anything (I was even able to write the script by guessing what the stuff would be called because the API is so similar to Unity!). This is a huge advantage over most of the other engines I have tried so far.

I applaud you for your hard work over the course of years @Bearish, and with @ShadowK being so motivated, I have high hopes for the future of this engine.

I'll keep an eye on this.

 

Well, I hope it'll take off. Now with Unity's new pricing failure (and blog post "explaining" them seeming to me like just a bunch of excuses) I'll desperately need another engine for future use. UE is too hard, I refuse to use godot because of GDScript being too close to Python for my liking, and Xenko seems to have license uncertainty. Haven't tried CryENGINE yet, but I think it's too much for me anyway, the only part of it that I'd consider useful is their modeling/level building tools.

So I hope it takes off since it seems to strike a good balance between Unreal's power and Unity's friendliness towards developers.

Gosh, I wish Source 2 would be out so I can try it out as well.