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Found 11 results

  1. Howdy, folks - it's been a long time since we've last had a proper development update on the Blamite Game Engine. Nearly 3 years, in fact - yikes. Let's fix that. Switching to OGRE The most significant feature in terms of technical significance was the switch to a new graphics engine - OGRE. More specifically we're using Ogre-Next 2.3. For those of you who have been lurking or chatting on our Discord server, you might have caught wind of some of our adventures in switching graphics libraries over the past while. From plain old DirectX, to Vulkan, to OpenGL, to bgfx, to trying some other more capable libraries such as OpenSceneGraph, The Forge, Diligent Engine, Filament, then giving up and going back to bgfx, and now finally starting to settle into Ogre. It's been quite the journey - one that we hope will finally come to a close now that we're starting to make real headway with Ogre. If you'd like to read about the journey we took to get here, check the spoiler below. Otherwise, keep reading. While we don't have anything too fancy to show yet, we hope to change that sooner rather than later. Ogre has support for PBR, lighting, particles, and more out of the box. It's built entirely around scenes and objects, which should make it much easier for us to start to get some real visuals going within the engine - and we hope to share some of that with our next development update. Thus far, our efforts have been centered less so on that, and moreso on building our all of the systems needed to support everything going forward. Editing Kit Blamite's Editing Kit (which includes Guerilla, Sapien, Tool, Foundry, and FontTool as of right now) is our toolset used for working with the game engine and creating content. Since our last major update, a lot of changes have been made. All of the tools now use Qt 5.15 for their GUIs, rather than Windows Forms - and as such, are all written in C++ instead of C#. To achieve this, we've introduced a new library - Keystone. This library contains all of the Qt GUI code (along with all of the stuff needed to drive that UI). Mind you, this library includes all of the GUI code for all of the tools within the Editing Kit. Additionally, all of the backend code that's specific to each tool is contained within a separate library from the executable. The result of these changes is that sharing code within each of the editing tools is painless. It means that in theory, you could edit tags within Sapien, and fly a camera around the engine in Guerilla. However, the more practical implementation that we'll be going for - this allows code for Guerilla and Sapien to be easily reused within Foundry, which will become the unified editor for Blamite - acting as a complete alternative to the original Editing Kit. Having things set up this way means that we don't have to reinvent the wheel twice over, and also means that changes can go the other way, too - if we make improvements to Foundry, the legacy tools will get those improvements, too. It also allows us to actually do things like open a game viewport from Sapien within Guerilla - which can be used for previewing render models, textures, materials, and more. Additionally, Keystone has support for themes - which can be authored both by us, but also by you! We've set things up to allow for users to create their own themes, and we've even got documentation already available if you'd like to take a crack at it. Beyond technical changes though, several tools have received new features compared to their C# versions - which are outlined below: Guerilla - Tag Designer Something that I had discussed as a sort of "nice-to-have" later on ended up finding its way in much sooner - largely out of necessity. Previously, creating tag classes within the game engine required that developers create both a data structure, and a separate field list containing metadata about those fields. Both of these had to exactly match, and both had different purposes. The data structure is used for the tag data itself - as it allows for tag data to have minimal overhead. No need to parse through a ton of hashmaps or anything - just read the data as a tag struct and use it like any other C++ structure. The field list is part of a BlamTagClass class, and this is used to generate plugin files directly from the game engine, as well as provide things such as an in-engine tag editor. The problem is, these two structures have to EXACTLY match - or else you can run into issues such as read access violations or memory corruption, and by extension, crashes - if you're lucky. You might not get a crash outright, and instead just get weird unexpected behavior. After a few (thankfully brief) instances of this, we decided that there was only one ideal fix: we needed a way to author a tag class one time, and then somehow have those two things generated from that. But how? Well, the Tag Designer is how. It's a visual, drag and drop tag class editor, available right within Guerilla. It can export to the standard plugin XML format, as well as to C++ header and source code ready for use within the game engine. Not only that, but it introduces the ability for tag fields to have default values - so you don't have to populate a ton of fields with a default value when creating a new tag. Additionally, tag classes can now include both a short and long description - which will eventually be used within the tools to provide a more user-friendly tag creation experience. Down the road, we plan to also allow tag classes to be registered by engine extensions - the idea being that if you're creating a game with Blamite, you can create your own tag classes with the designer, and while the game engine itself won't do much to them out of the box, you'll be able to use them in your own code and scripts. We believe this will become key in allowing Blamite to be used in a more general capacity than the original Halo engine - which was designed purely for first-person shooters and little else. Tag Field Changes Additionally, we've introduced a few new tag fields, and improved some existing ones. We've introduced vector2, vector3, and vector4 fields - which allow for 2D, 3D, and 4D vectors respectively. Along with that, we've introduced a new type of reference field: field references. These allow for fields to store a reference to another field - which we make use of currently within the material tag to allow for things such as material input parameters. Additionally, most tag fields have support for "input hints" - which are a small piece of text displayed on the right edge of a field, providing additional context for what kind of data is expected. This could be a range of values, such as [0,1], or a unit indicator such as world units or decibels, or really anything you'd like! Sapien Sapien is still a bit rougher around the edges for now - however, it's got the basics of the Hierarchy View and Properties Palette. It also now uses its own configuration file for settings, and it's received a few bugfixes. You'll also now see a loading dialog as a scenario is loaded - rather than things just freezing for a moment until it shows up. One somewhat significant change that will likely find its way to the rest of the editing kit is that it does not allow you to open a scenario tag directly. Instead, you are prompted to choose an available project, and then load a scenario within that project. This was done because, without the editor having the context of a project, it doesn't know how to resolve tag references - as it can't know where the relative tag root is. While Blamite is set up by default to follow the usual /levels/multi/whatever/whatever.scenario format, it isn't enforced by the engine - and you could in theory structure your content however you like. As such, we can't make any real assumptions about where the tag root is without having the existing context of a project. For now, though, we'll leave you with a screenshot of Sapien with its default Midnight theme: FontTool 2.0 For those unaware, FontTool (originally FontExtractor) is our tool used to create font packages and export fonts for use within the engine. It was originally written in C# and only had the ability to export TrueType and OpenType fonts - and it would export each character as its own image. As we started rebuilding our UI systems under Ogre, we realized that we needed to clean this up a fair bit - as while it can support loading textures this way, it is slow. So, for 2.0, one of the highlight features is the ability to export to a font atlas - a single texture with all your characters. It's even got handy guidelines that you can toggle, so you can see just how your atlas gets split up. Along with support for font atlases, it has an improved preview UI that is much more accurate to what you'd see in-game, and it properly respects the various export settings listed in the top part of the window. And of course - since it now uses C++ and Qt5, it should be a little bit faster too. Other Changes With all those changes to the Editing Kit, out of the way, let's look over some of the other less significant, but still exciting changes: Tag Classes Several new tag classes are now supported within the engine. These include: [bitm] bitmap - Used to store texture information [cusc] cui_screen - These store UI widgets that generally encompass an entire viewport, currently supports basic primitives, text, and groups [ligh] light - These allow for lights to be created and used within a level, though are currently unused [mat] material - These store material settings, and are used to define the appearance of a 2D sprite or 3D model - currently these support PBR and Unlit material information [matg] globals - These store global settings and data shared across an entire project, and currently store default materials and bitmaps, as well as the default fallback bitmap [scnr] scenario - These are the "entry point" for a level, and currently include blocks for primitives and project folders Console and Debug Menu The console and debug menu have also received some improvements. The console now supports column display in special circumstances (such as the help guide when pressing Tab), and both the console and debug menu are now noticeably faster. The debug menu now also has additional hotkey support, similar to what you'd find in later versions of the Halo engine. What's taken so long? Why is progress so slow? No doubt, while there's a decent number of changes described here - it may at first glance seem absurd that it's taken this long for these changes to finally happen. And, yeah - you're right. Progress has been kind of slow for some time, in no small part due to the consistently mentioned lack of other team members. Thus far, it's essentially just been me - slowly chipping away at this thing over years. However, even beyond that - in a lot of ways, we've actually been somewhat spinning in place for a little while now. Migrating our toolset from Windows Forms to Qt5, switching rendering libraries several times, and then migrating all of our old systems over to these new systems - it's a process. And while there are certainly new features and enhancements that have come from this, it's not entirely inaccurate to say that a lot of the work done has been retracing old steps. There's more to it than that from a technical standpoint of course, but from an end user standpoint - it's easy to see the project as making poor progress - even with the consideration that it's just one guy behind it. You might even compare some screenshots of the engine now to some of the first ones from 2016 - and things at first glance look almost the exact same: the default blue ImGUI background color with a menu bar. There's more to things if you dig for them, and of course there's editing tools now, but it's easy to write things off as "wow, 4 years from when active development started, and no 3D yet - what a joke". And perhaps that's not even an unfair assessment However, unlike the past while, today marks a real turning point - as today, all of the old functionality from DirectX and bgfx have been rebuilt using Ogre, and we've even gone so far as to drop those renderers from the game engine - leaving Ogre as our only one. Going forward, our plan is to first do a bit of housekeeping - making sure everything is well-documented (which shouldn't take too long, as most stuff is already documented), getting rid of any old and unnecessary code, and making sure performance is at a reasonable spot. From there, we're going to be focused exclusively on new features - which hasn't been the case for a long time. But that finally changes now - we are finally past the point of having to perform major code migrations, and going forward - it's all about new stuff. This leads us into the last part of this update - another development build. With this last build, the old DirectX 11 and bgfx renderers are all in working order. As such, we thought it'd be fun to keep them around for this next development build - so that they can live on in at least some form, even if limited. You can switch rendering engines by changing the rendering_engine configuration setting (located under the rendering section) within either the configuration editor or directly in engine.cfg. The valid values to try out each renderer are as follows: DirectX 11 - directx11 BGFX - bgfx OGRE - ogre This marks the last build that will ever utilize these renderers - as by the time you're reading this, we've already dropped them from the codebase. As per usual, you can expect to find plenty of bugs, errors, and even crashes - run these builds at your own risk. It should also go without saying, but the engine is currently not in a state where it could be feasibly used for game development. These builds are mostly for historical preservation for the future, and also to allow those of you interested in the project to toy around with things and get a taste of what's to come. Our hope is that the next development update will show real meaningful progress, and that we can even include a proper tech demo to showcase what the engine can do. Is that ambitious? Perhaps - but I suppose time will tell. For now, though - that's all we've got. If you'd like to follow development more closely in the meantime, you've actually got several options: Stratagem - Our trello-like board where we keep track of bugs, features, and so on Commits - A page where you can view every commit made to the Blamite repository, going back to 2017 when Blamite was first tracked using Git Discord - Our community Discord server, within which you'll find the #blamite channel, where you can effectively see progress in real-time as I type and showcase features and fixes as I work on them As per usual, we're always looking for more folks to join our team - the more the merrier! If you're interested in joining the development team for the Blamite Game Engine, feel free to apply using the button below! You'll also find a button to take you to the download page for the mentioned Blamite development build. Join the Team Download the Latest Development Build
  2. Hey, everyone! We've got a short and sweet announcement today. As of today, all of our generated documentation for the Blamite Game Engine is now public to all users. What does this mean? This means slightly different things depending on who you are. If you're part of our team, it means you don't have to remember your login credentials anymore. If you're someone who just wants to play a game, this will likely be meaningless to you. If you're someone who's curious as to what goes on with Blamite under the hood, this ought to be an exciting source of knowledge for you to comb through. What does the documentation contain? The documentation contains information about a great deal of the code within the engine. It includes documentation of all classes, methods, global variables, macros, enums, functions, and more throughout the entire game engine, including the engine core itself, the executables, and all the Editing Kit. The vast majority of code should be fully documented, although you may find areas here and there which aren't. These are likely incomplete features that are undergoing major changes, legacy code that will be removed in the future, or just something that we forgot to document As of right now, the list of projects available are as follows: blam - The game engine core. blamite - A small executable which is used to run the engine. eula - An unused library which will likely be removed in the future. FontExtractor - A C#-based tool used to create font packages. foundry - A small executable used to run the Foundry editor. guerilla - A small executable used to run the Guerilla tag editor. HEKFoundry - The library containing all Foundry-specific functionality. Used by foundry and keystone. HEKGuerilla - The library containing all Guerilla-specific functionality. Used by guerilla and keystone. HEKSapien - The library containing all Sapien-specific functionality. Used by sapien and keystone. HEKTool - The library containing all Tool-specific functionality. Used by tool and keystone. keystone - A library that contains all Qt-based UI functionality. Used within the entire Editing Kit, excluding legacy C# projects. sapien - A small executable used to run the Sapien level editor. Strings - A general-purpose library used across all projects. tool - A small executable used to run Tool. verstamp - A smal C#-based utility, used during the Jenkins build procedure to "stamp" version information into a build. How can I access it? The latest documentation from a fresh Jenkins build will always be accessible at https://hub.elaztek.com/docs/latest/ . However, we also archive documentation from all prior builds as well. You can browse these at https://hub.elaztek.com/docs/. Please note that you will see 'Restricted' messages on all documentation builds prior to 00347.12.11.21.1920.blamite. This is because until now, the documentation was completely restricted to the public. You may of course disregard those warnings now. If you have any questions about Blamite (or of anything you run across in the documentation), feel free to let me know either here on the website, or on our Discord!
  3. Boy, this is different, huh? As you can probably already tell, we've done some work on the Elaztek website - some of which is long overdue. Let's jump right into it. New News First and most obvious at this point, our News & Announcements section has gotten a major overhaul. Up until now, all announcements were done through just a subforum, much like how it's has been (and will continue to be) done on Chaotic United. However, for Elaztek we wanted to do something a bit more. In order to make the News-reading experience just a bit nicer, we've made the font size larger than the normal font size you'll find on Forums. You'll also be able to view all the thumbnail images for each announcement when browsing through the archives. For any announcement posted before this one, you'll find a purple book icon in the bottom right of the article when viewing articles in the list, as well as a big block at the bottom of the page content. That allows you to view the original forum topic that the announcement linked to. There usually won't be much real reason to need to do that - since all the announcements are already migrated into the News system anyway, but hey. Previously, we had a really hacky system for getting news to work with our homepage. And it all has to do with those little brief text descriptions. You know - that little quick half-sentence below the announcement title. For this announcement, it's "New year, new website.". You see, there is no system to add arbitrary fields and data to a specific forum topic (or any forum topic, for that matter). But if you recall, our news has had those little blurbs even before this change. So how does that work? Well, this news system you're currently reading this on is a custom database, a feature of our forum software called IPS Community Suite. Through the Pages application, we can use these Databases for virtually anything we want - and we'd been using this one as an intermediary layer between the homepage and the News & Announcements subforum. Without getting too technical, the process for posting a new Announcement was this: Post the announcement on Forums Go to the Beta News page and post an announcement, with a link to the topic, the blurb, and the announcement image Go to the list of announcements in the Beta News page, and unfeature the 2nd most recent announcement Feature the new announcement It may not seem like much, but compared to just posting the announcement and having it be a one-step process? That was absurd. This also neatly leads into the next focus of the redesign (which actually happened before we overhauled the News section). Homepage Redesign Yes, the homepage has a brand new look (mostly). In addition to adding the new Blamite banner underneath the Recent News section, we've removed the old Calendar and Releases sections. But why, you may ask? Well, the reason they were added was because, at the time, we really liked Bungie/Installation 01's website. Our current forums theme is still largely modeled after that design, and the homepage was made to look extremely similar to theirs as well. Since then, however... our tastes have changed a bit. Along with that, we just didn't like how the homepage was sort of forced into mimicking that look no matter what, even though it really didn't fit our needs. We had no real use for the weird calendar thing, nor did we have any need for the Releases section. So, with our new homepage, we just dropped them. The content they reference all still exists (and if you visit the old homepage, those will still work), but they don't serve much real purpose on our new homepage. As implied above, the earlier News setup was also part of that. However, instead of moving News entirely back to Forums, we instead opted to make the News system its own thing - and giving it some healthy improvements to help it stand out. New About Page(s) Another thing that we somehow went this long without creating is a proper About page. Fret not, as we've now introduced one. On the about page, you can find a list of all current and previous projects (most of which were just ideas that never got off the ground, but y'know), some history of Elaztek, and other neat information. You can find that page by clicking here. Dust and Echoes For those of you who were around in 2018, you might recall a project we had called Galactiminer Evolved. For those unaware, this was a dusted-off version of an older project called Galactiminer. Among other things, we actually launched a Kickstarter campaign, which unsurprisingly didn't even come close to succeeding. As of 2019, we formally placed it on indefinite hold and have been focused entirely on Blamite ever since. Thing is, it seems that we forgot to add a proper notice on Galactiminer's own website - whoops. As of now, that's been fixed. The Galactiminer website will remain online for the foreseeable future, although account creation has been disabled on that site - making it read-only. Additionally, while this isn't related to anything Elaztek - since Bungie announced that they were taking down http://halo.bungie.net, we took it upon ourselves to make a mostly-complete archive of that website. It doesn't include stats, and some dynamic content won't work. But the bulk of the website itself is there, with care taken to ensure that their old news posts were fully preserved. You can browse our archive at http://bnetarchive.elaztek.com, today and for as long as we exist (unless Bungie lawyers come to complain). Signing Off That's all we've got for now, folks. I'll leave you with a couple screenshots of the current state of the Guerilla rewrite - be sure to join our Discord to see updates as they happen.
  4. Hey, everyone! Not much to actually write here, but we've just uploaded a YouTube video going over the current state of the Blamite Game Engine. We plan to create more of these as time goes along and the engine continues to grow and evolve. We can't say how often they'll be produced, but we want to start showing off new features as they get developed. Sometimes they'll just be simpler stuff without too much visual flare, other times it might be something a bit more exciting. This first video was uploaded yesterday and was recorded by yours truly. It's a fairly in-depth one as I was both somewhat sleep-deprived, as well as the video being entirely unscripted. So, if you want to check it out, bundle up, grab some popcorn, and give it a watch.
  5. Hey, everyone! Not much to actually write here, but we've just uploaded a YouTube video going over the current state of the Blamite Game Engine. We plan to create more of these as time goes along and the engine continues to grow and evolve. We can't say how often they'll be produced, but we want to start showing off new features as they get developed. Sometimes they'll just be simpler stuff without too much visual flare, other times it might be something a bit more exciting. This first video was uploaded yesterday and was recorded by yours truly. It's a fairly in-depth one as I was both somewhat sleep-deprived, as well as the video being entirely unscripted. So, if you want to check it out, bundle up, grab some popcorn, and give it a watch.
  6. Hey, everyone! It's been a little bit, and we've got some news to share! Gitlab Migration First off: we've once again migrated the Gitlab, except this time we didn't break LFS data. The new and updated Gitlab can be found at the Gitlab's original URL: https://gitlab.elaztek.com. As a result, if you have any repositories cloned you will need to update the origin push/pull URL's to point to gitlab.elaztek.com instead of newgitlab.elaztek.com. Since all the old data (accounts, repositories, etc.) is still present, no other adjustments should need to be made to those URL's. You may need to log-in again if you use a GUI application for interacting with Git, and if your repositories utilize webhooks those may need to be adjusted as well (though this depends on the hooks themselves typically). The old URL (ironically named https://newgitlab.elaztek.com) has been set to redirect automatically to the new URL. As a sidenote, the Gitlab has not exchanged hands during this migration. Seeing as internally I've mentioned moving things to my own hosting a few times (and I suppose it's possible that such information may have slipped out potentially), I figure its worth mentioning. The main purpose behind this migration is to reduce the sheer number of servers that have been in use by Errite (the studio that hosts Gitlab as well as assists with other server-management-stuffs with Elaztek and CU), as it became more costly than made sense. Blamite Game Engine You didn't think we've been sitting alone doing nothing the past few months, have you? If you did think that - you'd be entirely justified because there's been a lot of that before. But today, we've got some goods to show off. For most of you, it'll be more boring stuff - but while it isn't much on the surface, it's actually a much bigger deal under the hood - and I'll try to make that clear as best as I can. Engine Architecture Changes The game engine has, up until now, been a standalone executable. No libraries or anything crazy like that, just a simple blam.exe and that's it. However, as time went on it became clear that this wasn't gonna work out long-term. The engine's core has to be used outside of just the game - Sapien will need to use it, our UI editing tool that has yet to be named needs to use it, and our planned unified editor for Blamite will of course need to use it as well. So, we had to perform some adjustments to migrate the engine from being a standalone application to a DLL, or Dynamic Link Library. In layman's terms, this means the engine can be utilized by other applications without having to bake the engine's runtime into each and every development tool by hand. We aren't done with that migration, as the migration has revealed a couple real issues - namely that the engine doesn't have a very clean startup and shutdown routine. There's a lot of data that "persists" through restarts erroneously, that was previously given no thought since that data would just be lost on exit. However, this mainly refers to trying to do things like stop/start the engine from those external tools - initial startup works just fine. Documentation Along with this, we've started to build up a documentation website for Blamite. Or, rather, a "Guides" section. We have automated source documentation built via Doxygen, but this is presently kept behind lock and key - as it includes many of the source code files for the engine. What isn't being kept behind lock and key is this new Guides section, which is derived from the Blamite repository's Wiki section. The new documentation is crisp, clean, and much easier to use than Gitlab's built-in Wiki (especially for what we're using it for). Keep in mind - absolutely nothing on these guides should be relied upon for any amount of real guidance at the moment. Since the engine is only in its infancy at the moment, a lot of things are undocumented. What is documented are, in many cases, old feature plans by 16-year-old-me back when I had no real clue how to do anything with a game engine, or even C++ for that matter. You will see a few pages marked with a notice like this: Usually it will contain a message about me harshly criticizing my past self and stating that the page exists for archival purposes only. Most of these pages are kept in the 'Deprecated' category. Other pages are either out of date, incomplete, or in some cases may actually be complete if you're lucky. Don't expect anything too exciting on the guides for a while, though you may periodically get a glimpse under the hood in between announcements. The new guides section can be found at https://hub.elaztek.com/guides/latest. Tags - The backbone of all Blamite content For those of you at all familiar with Halo's game engine, you've surely heard of Tags before. In Bungie's engine, tags are used for the vast majority of all game content. And as of now, Blamite has full support for creating new tags and tag classes. Cache files (.map files) aren't implemented yet, and there are a few other things that need to be accounted for, but the bulk of the engine's tag/tagclass system is functional. Along with that, we've made a couple minor but, in my opinion, very key changes that will prove to be invaluable later on. Each tag file stores the version under which it was created within its file. And while this may not seem like a huge deal, it means that we'll be able to actually know what exact version each tag was built with. This can be used for a number of things, particularly with backwards compatibility. We could either let the engine be aware of all previous tag formats - though this could prove to become very unwieldy, very fast. A more realistic implementation is having Guerilla facilitate tag upgrading. We could even make it so Guerilla can automatically download the appropriate plugin files for that tag and help the user migrate their tags forward. No tag classes have actually been solidified yet. In fact, Guerilla hasn't even been upgraded to be able to handle proper tag files. But it's something that'll be happening sooner rather than later. Screenshots So, I've talked about a number of things in this post - but so far, I've not shown anything in the way of photos. Let's fix that. Below you can find some screenshots of the various engine tools. Each image will have a brief explanation below it. Sapien Guerilla Blamite Engine Unfortunately folks, that's all we've got - for now. Progress is always being made - and while not all of it is worth showing off, be rest assured we're always inching closer to having a fully functional engine on our hands. 3D rendering isn't being worked on yet - but we're very close to being there. Until then, we'll see you all next time.
  7. Hey, everyone! It's been a little bit, and we've got some news to share! Gitlab Migration First off: we've once again migrated the Gitlab, except this time we didn't break LFS data. The new and updated Gitlab can be found at the Gitlab's original URL: https://gitlab.elaztek.com. As a result, if you have any repositories cloned you will need to update the origin push/pull URL's to point to gitlab.elaztek.com instead of newgitlab.elaztek.com. Since all the old data (accounts, repositories, etc.) is still present, no other adjustments should need to be made to those URL's. You may need to log-in again if you use a GUI application for interacting with Git, and if your repositories utilize webhooks those may need to be adjusted as well (though this depends on the hooks themselves typically). The old URL (ironically named https://newgitlab.elaztek.com) has been set to redirect automatically to the new URL. As a sidenote, the Gitlab has not exchanged hands during this migration. Seeing as internally I've mentioned moving things to my own hosting a few times (and I suppose it's possible that such information may have slipped out potentially), I figure its worth mentioning. The main purpose behind this migration is to reduce the sheer number of servers that have been in use by Errite (the studio that hosts Gitlab as well as assists with other server-management-stuffs with Elaztek and CU), as it became more costly than made sense. Blamite Game Engine You didn't think we've been sitting alone doing nothing the past few months, have you? If you did think that - you'd be entirely justified because there's been a lot of that before. But today, we've got some goods to show off. For most of you, it'll be more boring stuff - but while it isn't much on the surface, it's actually a much bigger deal under the hood - and I'll try to make that clear as best as I can. Engine Architecture Changes The game engine has, up until now, been a standalone executable. No libraries or anything crazy like that, just a simple blam.exe and that's it. However, as time went on it became clear that this wasn't gonna work out long-term. The engine's core has to be used outside of just the game - Sapien will need to use it, our UI editing tool that has yet to be named needs to use it, and our planned unified editor for Blamite will of course need to use it as well. So, we had to perform some adjustments to migrate the engine from being a standalone application to a DLL, or Dynamic Link Library. In layman's terms, this means the engine can be utilized by other applications without having to bake the engine's runtime into each and every development tool by hand. We aren't done with that migration, as the migration has revealed a couple real issues - namely that the engine doesn't have a very clean startup and shutdown routine. There's a lot of data that "persists" through restarts erroneously, that was previously given no thought since that data would just be lost on exit. However, this mainly refers to trying to do things like stop/start the engine from those external tools - initial startup works just fine. Documentation Along with this, we've started to build up a documentation website for Blamite. Or, rather, a "Guides" section. We have automated source documentation built via Doxygen, but this is presently kept behind lock and key - as it includes many of the source code files for the engine. What isn't being kept behind lock and key is this new Guides section, which is derived from the Blamite repository's Wiki section. The new documentation is crisp, clean, and much easier to use than Gitlab's built-in Wiki (especially for what we're using it for). Keep in mind - absolutely nothing on these guides should be relied upon for any amount of real guidance at the moment. Since the engine is only in its infancy at the moment, a lot of things are undocumented. What is documented are, in many cases, old feature plans by 16-year-old-me back when I had no real clue how to do anything with a game engine, or even C++ for that matter. You will see a few pages marked with a notice like this: Usually it will contain a message about me harshly criticizing my past self and stating that the page exists for archival purposes only. Most of these pages are kept in the 'Deprecated' category. Other pages are either out of date, incomplete, or in some cases may actually be complete if you're lucky. Don't expect anything too exciting on the guides for a while, though you may periodically get a glimpse under the hood in between announcements. The new guides section can be found at https://hub.elaztek.com/guides/latest. Tags - The backbone of all Blamite content For those of you at all familiar with Halo's game engine, you've surely heard of Tags before. In Bungie's engine, tags are used for the vast majority of all game content. And as of now, Blamite has full support for creating new tags and tag classes. Cache files (.map files) aren't implemented yet, and there are a few other things that need to be accounted for, but the bulk of the engine's tag/tagclass system is functional. Along with that, we've made a couple minor but, in my opinion, very key changes that will prove to be invaluable later on. Each tag file stores the version under which it was created within its file. And while this may not seem like a huge deal, it means that we'll be able to actually know what exact version each tag was built with. This can be used for a number of things, particularly with backwards compatibility. We could either let the engine be aware of all previous tag formats - though this could prove to become very unwieldy, very fast. A more realistic implementation is having Guerilla facilitate tag upgrading. We could even make it so Guerilla can automatically download the appropriate plugin files for that tag and help the user migrate their tags forward. No tag classes have actually been solidified yet. In fact, Guerilla hasn't even been upgraded to be able to handle proper tag files. But it's something that'll be happening sooner rather than later. Screenshots So, I've talked about a number of things in this post - but so far, I've not shown anything in the way of photos. Let's fix that. Below you can find some screenshots of the various engine tools. Each image will have a brief explanation below it. Sapien Guerilla Blamite Engine Unfortunately folks, that's all we've got - for now. Progress is always being made - and while not all of it is worth showing off, be rest assured we're always inching closer to having a fully functional engine on our hands. 3D rendering isn't being worked on yet - but we're very close to being there. Until then, we'll see you all next time.
  8. Hey, everyone! We've been doing some updates, upgrades, and general improvements to the Elaztek website! We've introduced new features as well as enhanced and improved old ones. Overall, the general theme is bringing more parity with CU's forums - with the eventual end goal being that the two forums move in lockstep when it comes to general community features. Moods These have been on Chaotic United's forums for quite some time, but we figured it was high time that they made their way over here. All the moods that are available on CU are available here. Along with that, we've fixed a few minor display issues with several moods (on both Elaztek and CU forums). Nothing too spectacular or out of the ordinary. Hit the smiley face in the top-left of the navbar to set your mood! Awards We've actually had a handful of awards set up for a while. Many of them were unused (and still are), and virtually none of the awards from CU's forums made their way over. Well, since part of CU's relaunch was its new awards setup, we've brought many of those awards over to Elaztek - excluding ones that don't really fit Elaztek. However, we've also disabled many of the (small selection of) old awards - primarily, the category named "Blamite Expertise" and the Contest award "Project: Infinity Mapmaking Contest". These were both disabled because, well, it's gonna be a long time before those awards are going to even be relevant. Blamite is years from being of quality (and likely still at least a couple away from actual, proper gameplay), and Project: Infinity is also quite a ways out as a result. They'll be refined and reimplemented when Project: Infinity and Blamite are complete. Several awards, new and old, are currently pending some new icons. Keep an eye out for those. We won't make an announcement, but you'll see it in a changelog at some point in our Update Notes blog. Profile Changes These are the most minor of the changes (besides the minor fixes and edits in the changelog), but still worth mentioning. The old 'PC Specs' field has been disabled and, in its place, a full category called 'System Information' for you to put all your different PC information. CPU, GPU, Operating System, RAM, and so on - each one has its own respective field. And if we've missed one, we've added another field for other system info. If your PC has some special quirks about it, you can share those details in the 'Other PC Info' field. We've also added a new Profile Step for you to quickly and easily put it all in. Additionally, we've added a few other minor fields for Interests, Discord username, Skype username, and Location. We've also made it where several major fields (Steam, Discord, etc.) show up alongside your forum posts - much like how they do on CU. Wrapping Up We've made a few other smaller changes here and there, but they don't really warrant much mention here. If you want to know all the details, check out the full changelog in the latest Update Notes blog entry linked below. Lastly, if you (or anyone you know) is interested in game design, development, or engine programming, send them our way! We're always looking for new people to introduce to the team - Blamite isn't gonna build itself, y'know. If you wish to join our team, slam the "Join the Team" button below. Alternatively, if you want to learn more about Blamite, click the 'Blamite' link in the navigation bar. We'll bid you farewell for now with a few screenshots from me working on text rendering: Our font system effectively draws text as a series of bitmaps strung together. (we needed a way to draw text independently of dear imgui) After creating a tool called FontExtractor to export our favorite Fixedsys font into these glyph images, it started to come together. The spacing was due to how FontExtractor exported images, leaving lots of blank space in the resulting image files. And then this happened. Uncompressed fonts utilize a fontinfo.xml file to determine how glyph images are drawn (including sizes and such) - here, the glyphs were cropped by FontExtractor but the actual size in the XML file wasn't yet updated to reflect that change. After that was sorted out, we added a WIP font editor dialog to play around with the font properties to get optimal displays. In the future we'd ideally have FontExtractor handle this automatically, but hey - this works for now. The charspacing property determines how much space is left between characters when drawing. Setting it to negative can be used to draw text backwards. Good to know. You can alternatively just make it really high and have some w i d e l y s p a c e d t e x t . But, setting everything properly, the end result is nearly identical to the standard text (as seen in the windows in the screenshots). The text in those windows is handled through an entirely different system, and it cannot be (elegantly) used to just draw text at a point on the screen. The font display with our custom setup isn't perfect, but it's very, very close. Upcoming work includes implementing a proper game tick, doing some reorganizing of the codebase, and then adding the ability to tint/color our text. Following that, we'll start on properly implementing the console. And after that? Who knows? Stay tuned to find out! Also, if you want more stuff like this, let us know - we'd be happy to do development updates (when there's meaningful progress to share). Join the Team Learn about Blamite
  9. Hey, everyone! We've been doing some updates, upgrades, and general improvements to the Elaztek website! We've introduced new features as well as enhanced and improved old ones. Overall, the general theme is bringing more parity with CU's forums - with the eventual end goal being that the two forums move in lockstep when it comes to general community features. Moods These have been on Chaotic United's forums for quite some time, but we figured it was high time that they made their way over here. All the moods that are available on CU are available here. Along with that, we've fixed a few minor display issues with several moods (on both Elaztek and CU forums). Nothing too spectacular or out of the ordinary. Hit the smiley face in the top-left of the navbar to set your mood! Awards We've actually had a handful of awards set up for a while. Many of them were unused (and still are), and virtually none of the awards from CU's forums made their way over. Well, since part of CU's relaunch was its new awards setup, we've brought many of those awards over to Elaztek - excluding ones that don't really fit Elaztek. However, we've also disabled many of the (small selection of) old awards - primarily, the category named "Blamite Expertise" and the Contest award "Project: Infinity Mapmaking Contest". These were both disabled because, well, it's gonna be a long time before those awards are going to even be relevant. Blamite is years from being of quality (and likely still at least a couple away from actual, proper gameplay), and Project: Infinity is also quite a ways out as a result. They'll be refined and reimplemented when Project: Infinity and Blamite are complete. Several awards, new and old, are currently pending some new icons. Keep an eye out for those. We won't make an announcement, but you'll see it in a changelog at some point in our Update Notes blog. Profile Changes These are the most minor of the changes (besides the minor fixes and edits in the changelog), but still worth mentioning. The old 'PC Specs' field has been disabled and, in its place, a full category called 'System Information' for you to put all your different PC information. CPU, GPU, Operating System, RAM, and so on - each one has its own respective field. And if we've missed one, we've added another field for other system info. If your PC has some special quirks about it, you can share those details in the 'Other PC Info' field. We've also added a new Profile Step for you to quickly and easily put it all in. Additionally, we've added a few other minor fields for Interests, Discord username, Skype username, and Location. We've also made it where several major fields (Steam, Discord, etc.) show up alongside your forum posts - much like how they do on CU. Wrapping Up We've made a few other smaller changes here and there, but they don't really warrant much mention here. If you want to know all the details, check out the full changelog in the latest Update Notes blog entry linked below. Lastly, if you (or anyone you know) is interested in game design, development, or engine programming, send them our way! We're always looking for new people to introduce to the team - Blamite isn't gonna build itself, y'know. If you wish to join our team, slam the "Join the Team" button below. Alternatively, if you want to learn more about Blamite, click the 'Blamite' link in the navigation bar. We'll bid you farewell for now with a few screenshots from me working on text rendering: Our font system effectively draws text as a series of bitmaps strung together. (we needed a way to draw text independently of dear imgui) After creating a tool called FontExtractor to export our favorite Fixedsys font into these glyph images, it started to come together. The spacing was due to how FontExtractor exported images, leaving lots of blank space in the resulting image files. And then this happened. Uncompressed fonts utilize a fontinfo.xml file to determine how glyph images are drawn (including sizes and such) - here, the glyphs were cropped by FontExtractor but the actual size in the XML file wasn't yet updated to reflect that change. After that was sorted out, we added a WIP font editor dialog to play around with the font properties to get optimal displays. In the future we'd ideally have FontExtractor handle this automatically, but hey - this works for now. The charspacing property determines how much space is left between characters when drawing. Setting it to negative can be used to draw text backwards. Good to know. You can alternatively just make it really high and have some w i d e l y s p a c e d t e x t . But, setting everything properly, the end result is nearly identical to the standard text (as seen in the windows in the screenshots). The text in those windows is handled through an entirely different system, and it cannot be (elegantly) used to just draw text at a point on the screen. The font display with our custom setup isn't perfect, but it's very, very close. Upcoming work includes implementing a proper game tick, doing some reorganizing of the codebase, and then adding the ability to tint/color our text. Following that, we'll start on properly implementing the console. And after that? Who knows? Stay tuned to find out! Also, if you want more stuff like this, let us know - we'd be happy to do development updates (when there's meaningful progress to share). Join the Team Learn about Blamite
  10. Hey, everyone! We have a new project to announce! This one being far more ambitious than any other project we've ever done. That project is the Blamite Game Engine. Now, I know what you guys must be thinking. Over the years we've been announcing project after project, with so far none of them being public. It seems like a joke, like we aren't taking any of it seriously. But this one is different - not because "oh, we're actually working on this one" or anything of the sort. Raven Runner and Project: Infinity have both been worked on since their inception. The thing with Blamite is that it will be the engine for Project: Infinity, as well as all of our games going forward (with the exception of anything that is released before its completion of course). So, why the change? What happened to Unreal Engine? Good question. This decision was made after going back and forth between a custom engine or Unreal. And while, yes, going the Unreal or Unity or any other "ready-to-go" engine would have been a much quicker route, and would at least be something to help us offset the fact that, compared to other projects like Installation 01 or Project: Contingency (two other fan made Halo games, you should go check them out and support them too), it isn't the route we are planning to go. From what has been seen with these teams, they don't seem to have much planning on what comes next for these people. Some of them will probably stick together, but the Installation 01 team themselves have said that they will more or less disperse after that project's time ends. Project: Contingency has not made such statements as far as I'm aware, but it's safe to say that these guys aren't really going in for the long haul necessarily. This isn't necessarily a bad thing really, as some of them will probably get a fair amount of attention by other industry giants and I suspect they won't have much difficulty getting jobs after the fact. Here at Elaztek, we aren't here for a one-hit-wonder. We are here for the long haul. We aren't here to push out one or two games and fade away, we are here to last. This engine isn't going to just be used in one or two games, it's going to be the foundation for all of our games going forward. On top of that, there are real technical reasons as well. First off, by using a custom engine, we have a lot more control over everything. We can choose how we want to store game data, we can choose how to distribute tools, we can change anything we want - it's our engine, and we can do literally anything we wish with it. If we find a bug, we can fix it. If we want a new feature, we can add it. If we want to support DirectX 11, OpenGL, and Vulkan, we can do it. Beyond that, we also have a strong passion for modders. We love when community members create content and expand upon their favorite games, taking them further than ever thought possible. Our marketplace will allow mods of any sort - as long as they aren't cheats, viruses, or anything else malicious of course. We support creativity, not ruining people's fun. If you develop a mod that uses crazy file patching of the actual executable and you need to provide 6 paragraphs of tutorials, you're welcome to distribute it. Got a cool tool that introduces some new features? Awesome! Just note that as a user: we aren't liable for any damages to your game data, account, or anything else as a result of using mods. We can't screen every single one for perfect integrity. If you do find something malicious, do report it to us immediately. But I seem to be getting off topic. The point is, Blamite is being built to enable modding. Not every single game will support it, of course. But we (for the most part) won't take steps to stop you from playing with a game you either obtained free of charge from us, or one you paid for. What exactly is this engine going to do? Our engine is being designed to operate similarly to Halo's Engine (unofficially known as Blam), and use many of the same basic ideas of operation - with some of our own blood mixed in, of course. Our goal is to make it where those used to creating maps for Halo Custom Edition or Halo 2 will find themselves in a fairly familiar environment, as well as make modders feel at home when doing some simple tag editing within a map. Now, I know what you're thinking. This has got to be illegal as hell. We believe that Blamite is legal for the same reason ReactOS, ElDewrito, and other projects are legal. Halo's engine is not sold on its own, only games made with it are sold. On top of that, we have a strict policy against using any reverse engineering to decompile official game executables. We don't use any official code - decompiled or leaked somehow - from the official games. Period. If you happen to be a Microsoft or 343 Industries employee reading this, and you determine that our work is ultimately not within legal bounds, we are more than willing to cooperate and reach an agreement on how to proceed. You can reach us by using our contact form or via emailing us at [email protected]. But the real question is: why? Why start this project that has a chance (albeit an incredibly tiny chance based on our understanding) of getting shut down or massively hindered by "The Man"? Passion. We are developing this for the same reason we are developing Project: Infinity. Out of passion. The Blam engine is an incredibly fun engine to play with, and with our first project being Project: Infinity - a fan made Halo game, it's a match made in heaven. Beyond that, we plan to continue to develop and update the engine from here on moving forward. How can I help this project? Want to help? Great! We have a huge amount of open positions at the time of this topic, since the project is still in very early stages. If you want to help out, you can click here to go to the signup page. Keep in mind that, like Project: Infinity, you will not be paid for work on this. This is being handled the same as Project: Infinity, partially because of the fact that this is being made for Infinity initially. We are mostly looking for those with experience in modding official Blam games (any game, preferably within Halo 3 to Reach, however any is really accepted) or those with experience in creating Halo Custom Edition content and working with the editing tools (Sapien, Guerrilla, Tool, etc). If you happen to just be a programmer with a love for Halo, that's cool too. If you're just a programmer looking for something to do, just understand what this engine is. Regardless of your status as a Halo modder, content creator, or just a fan, you will have relatively strict guidelines on how to develop the engine. As in, you will for the most part be making things work and operate in the same way the official Halo games load content. If you don't know how this works to begin with, be prepared to be educated (by someone, nobody in particular is in that role yet) about the ins and outs of the engine. Modders and creators will be at a strong advantage as they will already understand more or less how the engine operates. Relevant Links We have added some new sections to the website to help account for our new project, and all relevant links can be found below: Blamite Game Engine - Official Site Blamite Update Notes Blamite Development Blog Blamite Subforum Blamite Team Signup Page So, what's the plan? As the engine matures and grows, major updates and improvements will get their own announcement, with smaller, less significant updates being posted more frequently to the development blog. Changelogs for versions can be found in Blamite's update notes blog. What are your thoughts? Are you excited for the future of Elaztek and Blamite, and the future of all our upcoming projects? Do you think this is the dumbest thing ever? Let us know!
  11. Hey, everyone! We have a new project to announce! This one being far more ambitious than any other project we've ever done. That project is the Blamite Game Engine. Now, I know what you guys must be thinking. Over the years we've been announcing project after project, with so far none of them being public. It seems like a joke, like we aren't taking any of it seriously. But this one is different - not because "oh, we're actually working on this one" or anything of the sort. Raven Runner and Project: Infinity have both been worked on since their inception. The thing with Blamite is that it will be the engine for Project: Infinity, as well as all of our games going forward (with the exception of anything that is released before its completion of course). So, why the change? What happened to Unreal Engine? Good question. This decision was made after going back and forth between a custom engine or Unreal. And while, yes, going the Unreal or Unity or any other "ready-to-go" engine would have been a much quicker route, and would at least be something to help us offset the fact that, compared to other projects like Installation 01 or Project: Contingency (two other fan made Halo games, you should go check them out and support them too), it isn't the route we are planning to go. From what has been seen with these teams, they don't seem to have much planning on what comes next for these people. Some of them will probably stick together, but the Installation 01 team themselves have said that they will more or less disperse after that project's time ends. Project: Contingency has not made such statements as far as I'm aware, but it's safe to say that these guys aren't really going in for the long haul necessarily. This isn't necessarily a bad thing really, as some of them will probably get a fair amount of attention by other industry giants and I suspect they won't have much difficulty getting jobs after the fact. Here at Elaztek, we aren't here for a one-hit-wonder. We are here for the long haul. We aren't here to push out one or two games and fade away, we are here to last. This engine isn't going to just be used in one or two games, it's going to be the foundation for all of our games going forward. On top of that, there are real technical reasons as well. First off, by using a custom engine, we have a lot more control over everything. We can choose how we want to store game data, we can choose how to distribute tools, we can change anything we want - it's our engine, and we can do literally anything we wish with it. If we find a bug, we can fix it. If we want a new feature, we can add it. If we want to support DirectX 11, OpenGL, and Vulkan, we can do it. Beyond that, we also have a strong passion for modders. We love when community members create content and expand upon their favorite games, taking them further than ever thought possible. Our marketplace will allow mods of any sort - as long as they aren't cheats, viruses, or anything else malicious of course. We support creativity, not ruining people's fun. If you develop a mod that uses crazy file patching of the actual executable and you need to provide 6 paragraphs of tutorials, you're welcome to distribute it. Got a cool tool that introduces some new features? Awesome! Just note that as a user: we aren't liable for any damages to your game data, account, or anything else as a result of using mods. We can't screen every single one for perfect integrity. If you do find something malicious, do report it to us immediately. But I seem to be getting off topic. The point is, Blamite is being built to enable modding. Not every single game will support it, of course. But we (for the most part) won't take steps to stop you from playing with a game you either obtained free of charge from us, or one you paid for. What exactly is this engine going to do? Our engine is being designed to operate similarly to Halo's Engine (unofficially known as Blam), and use many of the same basic ideas of operation - with some of our own blood mixed in, of course. Our goal is to make it where those used to creating maps for Halo Custom Edition or Halo 2 will find themselves in a fairly familiar environment, as well as make modders feel at home when doing some simple tag editing within a map. Now, I know what you're thinking. This has got to be illegal as hell. We believe that Blamite is legal for the same reason ReactOS, ElDewrito, and other projects are legal. Halo's engine is not sold on its own, only games made with it are sold. On top of that, we have a strict policy against using any reverse engineering to decompile official game executables. We don't use any official code - decompiled or leaked somehow - from the official games. Period. If you happen to be a Microsoft or 343 Industries employee reading this, and you determine that our work is ultimately not within legal bounds, we are more than willing to cooperate and reach an agreement on how to proceed. You can reach us by using our contact form or via emailing us at [email protected]. But the real question is: why? Why start this project that has a chance (albeit an incredibly tiny chance based on our understanding) of getting shut down or massively hindered by "The Man"? Passion. We are developing this for the same reason we are developing Project: Infinity. Out of passion. The Blam engine is an incredibly fun engine to play with, and with our first project being Project: Infinity - a fan made Halo game, it's a match made in heaven. Beyond that, we plan to continue to develop and update the engine from here on moving forward. How can I help this project? Want to help? Great! We have a huge amount of open positions at the time of this topic, since the project is still in very early stages. If you want to help out, you can click here to go to the signup page. Keep in mind that, like Project: Infinity, you will not be paid for work on this. This is being handled the same as Project: Infinity, partially because of the fact that this is being made for Infinity initially. We are mostly looking for those with experience in modding official Blam games (any game, preferably within Halo 3 to Reach, however any is really accepted) or those with experience in creating Halo Custom Edition content and working with the editing tools (Sapien, Guerrilla, Tool, etc). If you happen to just be a programmer with a love for Halo, that's cool too. If you're just a programmer looking for something to do, just understand what this engine is. Regardless of your status as a Halo modder, content creator, or just a fan, you will have relatively strict guidelines on how to develop the engine. As in, you will for the most part be making things work and operate in the same way the official Halo games load content. If you don't know how this works to begin with, be prepared to be educated (by someone, nobody in particular is in that role yet) about the ins and outs of the engine. Modders and creators will be at a strong advantage as they will already understand more or less how the engine operates. Relevant Links We have added some new sections to the website to help account for our new project, and all relevant links can be found below: Blamite Game Engine - Official Site Blamite Update Notes Blamite Development Blog Blamite Subforum Blamite Team Signup Page So, what's the plan? As the engine matures and grows, major updates and improvements will get their own announcement, with smaller, less significant updates being posted more frequently to the development blog. Changelogs for versions can be found in Blamite's update notes blog. What are your thoughts? Are you excited for the future of Elaztek and Blamite, and the future of all our upcoming projects? Do you think this is the dumbest thing ever? Let us know!