After several months of development, the time has finally come: the official beta release of GFX for .NET 8 is in the starting blocks.
With this build, we not only want to modernise the engine for the future, but also add more features. For this reason, we have rewritten the entire engine from scratch and also replaced some old dependencies.
Among other things, we are now using OpenTK; we have removed the old, custom wrapper for this. This allows us to concentrate more on the engine itself without having to maintain other dependencies and projects. In addition, we now only use the OpenTK Math Library instead of three different ones.
Another important feature is that there is no longer a game class. This means that you can create them yourself and build them according to your desired architecture. The main benefit of this is that the new renderer works independently of scenes, entities and other game-relevant classes.
In addition, we are now focussing more on the creation of 3D projects. We offer instance-based rendering, various optimised shaders for static and animated meshes, sprites etc. right from the start.
A lot has also happened in the area of materials and lights. We are currently using a fully functional Specular Glossines workflow and already have a working PBR shader, but this is still under development and will be released with the stable release.
As far as the lights are concerned, we are using Clustered Forward+ rendering. This means that it is now finally possible to use multiple point lights and a directional light. This works through the new LightManager and is available in both 3D and 2D. Yes, you read that right, we finally have real lights for 2D projects too.
All in all, with this project we have created a starting point for a future-proof, modern and modular engine that is suitable for both 2D and 3D projects.
