The new Drag[en]gine Game Engine Release 1.5 is now globally illuminated with higher performance.

If you have installed the Drag[en]gine and/or IGDE using repositories or market place updates arrive automatically.

Otherwise get the 1.5 release files from the Download Section. You can install it over the 1.4 release but it is recommended to uninstalling 1.4 first to keep the game engine directory clean.

To develop games you do not need the game engine source code. Just install the IGDE, create a project, run and distribute to *.delga file and you are done.

This release took longer than previous release because of to main work units required for the Epsylon Demo. The first being a major performance optimization and the second the adding of Global Illumination.

Sticking some rockets to the Dragon

The Drag[en]gine received a large amount of optimizations in the graphic rendering area. Various areas have been optimized using parallel tasks where possible and reorganizing some rendering steps. The performance went up from an unoptimized 17 FPS the Epsylon Demo up to 50 to 60 FPS with GI enabled. More optimization will be done later on.

Illuminate the Dragon

The larger part of the work revolved around adding Global Illumination. I hoped to get away without it for the Epsylon Demo. As you can see from the screenshots below it was necessary to get it done now instead of later.

Now outside is sunny and bright while inside can be pitch black if no light reaches it well or not at all.

This is though not your regular Global Illumination, it's True Dynamic Global Illumination. So what does this mean? There are three kinds of Global Illumination you can do:

• Global Illumination: This is the traditional approach. Both lights and geometry have to be static and all lighting is preprocessed then shipped with the game.
• Dynamic Global Illumination: Showing up more recently it is a bit of a misguiding name. Lights can be dynamic with this one but geometry still has to stay static. Here too lighting is preprocessed and shipped with the game but changes as lights change.
• True Dynamic Global Illumination: This is the newest kid on the block and typically shows up whenever those fancy new DXR/RTX enabled GPUs show up. Here both lighting and geometry can be dynamic. Preprocessing lighting is not required here.

Drag[en]gine uses now a True Dynamic Global Illumination system which does not require a DXR/RTX enabled GPU. What you get is instant Global Illumination in your projects without preprocessing which is fully dynamic at runtime and does not need ray tracing hardware.

The video below show the Global Illumination in action in the ExampleApp and the Editor. This is the lowest supported hardware version which means Fragment Shader only (neither DXR/RTX nor Compute Shaders). CS and RTX will be added later on to crank up the performance and quality.

Some more Example Images

Some other stuff added (besides others)

See the full Changelog of the latest release on this Perma-Link: Changelog Latest Release.

If you find bugs or missing features please Please report them on GitHub or at the Developer Forum.

If you have questions, suggestions or other inquiries you can PM me here or stop by the Discord Channel.