Comments - SolarPortal

Any physics can be tweaked. For example you used water. This is all controllable through script. To make a water volume, you would need to add a triggerbox to the scene to detect colliding physics shapes. After you would apply the forces, restition etc.. that you want for watert, slime space ;) We have an extensive set of physics functions designed especially for what you want.

To store this volume you made for later usage, you simply save it in our .preset format which is a saved off entity in the scene and holds all the dynamic content like scripts and actions. Then drag this in as many times as you want or as many scenes as you want :)

The video splash screens will be supported soon, but for now we have a loading screen as a GUI as the game boots.
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Well i hope this helps :D

Physics) Can you describe a little bit more with what sort of "edits to templates" or "creating your own" you mean as i am not entirely sure what you are after :)

Whatever you are after though, we can work it into the engine so you can use it if the task is doable and reasonable as we do listen to our users feature requests.

Thank you for your support ;)

SplashScreen) Yes, the end game has a basic splash screen for the compiled game, but you can change this if you want.
We are planning for more splashscreens that use the video technique instead of a GUI.

If there is anything you need, then please post to the forums or email support(at)aurasoft-skyline(dot)co(dot)uk and enjoy skyline.

2) Yes, this will be mostly true. We will have a c++ SDK at some point but it does not have the backing of the userbase as most of our users are hobbyists.

3) Well, we use physX as our main physics library and we are trying to add as many features as possible to save users the time on creating the parts everyone has to do everytime a game is made lol :P There are still a couple of parts to add in though.

4) Accepted formats that we use as our main ones are: .fbx, .dae, .x, .lwo, .obj, there are also many more as we have included the open source library Assimp and most of the formats work in one respect or another.

9) Thanks, i will go through the sites ammending the information for the updates to be more clear :)

10) We tend to release a changelog for every version, but not normally for the assets. Plus the scene files when upgraded generally don't need to show anything as it hasn't failed us yet lol :P But again, i can look at possibly building a system to notify you of the changes in your scene that were changed.

Thank you for the kind works, it really gives us motivation when other people show their great opinions of our engine. We look forward to you joining our community as we like to keep it friendly and creative.

til then :D

p.s. Here is some links:

roadmap: Trello.com
main site: Home.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk
Forum: Forum.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk

Hello Thank you for the Comments and i will try to respond with the best information we can provide.

Skyline is in Beta and this means that not all features are in place or there may be bugs and crashes that may occur when working. With saying this though, i believe skyline has a lot of talent and a great possible future. Anyway onto the questions:

1) This is a strange one to answer considering all the engines are different in what they do and who they are provided to. But we would say that we work very well depending on what you are doing. Skyline offers pro features but is aimed at the hobbyist or indie market and designed without a steep learning curve.

2) Skyline is being developed to be as simple as possible in use but with a powerful result and also we wish the engine to be accessible by the artists. When designing features, we wish things to be done within a few mouse clicks or button presses. We attempt to automate what we can to save you time. We also have a cool asset manager and resource system. No need to have duplicate assets per game as one library can be shared across all games.

Check out this Slant page for pros and cons endorsed by users:
Slant.co

3) There is a near complete physics library which supports everything you mentioned apart from hair and cloth. We have already made things like planes, vehicles, boats, characters, triggerboxs, full collisions each way and also have sensor sweeps all which are accessible to AI if programmed. We also have a ragdoll feature in dev but it requires a few tweaks before releasing it.

4) Skyline can import almost any art format. We mainly use FBX for our main model import routine and it is generally quite accurate with results. We have full support of rigging and animations with Bipeds and IK rigs.

Skyline's asset manager is capable of handling mesh conversion and import all for you. Our materials are single files and can be shared across many meshes. We also support multi materials on meshes and can assign any material to any mesh with ability to overwrite the base mesh data. Full freedom is what we aim for. When you prepare assets for skyline, materials are generated automatically with high quality shaders and apply the normal and specular maps if found in the same location.

5) Skyline is designed to be genre agnostic, but this includes full open world gameplay. We can handle large terrains up to 16km without paging lol :P We have also been planning on upgrading this area and are going to be implementing a paging solution for the terrain and assets for even bigger or unlimited worlds.

For the vegetation, we currently support static batching with transitional impostors for large forest rendering. However, we are redesigning the entire vegetation system as it does have the odd issue to be honest, but our new system will rival all others :) For the grass we use billboards and they have many features including wind.

As for the performance of openworld, currently is is just frustum and LOD stages, but we do have plans for adding dynamic lodding and full occlusion culling. Plus there is lots more to add that we have planned.

6) For audio, we support .ogg and .wav, we prefer to use the .ogg though as it has good compression and keeps quality. Sadly we cannot use .mp3 due to licensing problems and if supported by users, then we can look into adding .flac

7) Yes, we do use DX9, but it is still pushing some good quality visuals and gives great backwards compatibility. Saying this though does not mean we are not developing DX11, it will take a bit more time though. A very cool thing that we can tell you today is that skyline is now 64bit enabled as of today as i just got the compilation working for it :D :D :D

8) Visual scripting (what we call visual mechanics editor) will be available in the next release of skyline, just a few extra bits are being sorted atm. The modules (code blocks) that you or anyone else needs can be added when requested and released in a automatic patch update.

9) hehe, yes this is the true price of the engine. We aim for affordable licensing to everyone. You only pay another £20 after your updates run out. The £20 provides you with another year of updates.
Your first year of updates only starts when we exit BETA, so all updates are free atm.

There are no extra costs or charges that we incur, but we do have the odd library integrated that does need payed for if you exceed their license restrictions. However, we will always try to offer a seperate non limited source library beside it to not add any more pain lol :P

10) Wherever possible we have placed an automatic upgrade system to make your life easier when developing.
<ul>
<li> Scene Files: When opening a scene on a new version of skyline, it will auto upgrade everything to match the new version. A Backup file is saved in the same place in case of errors.
<li> Preset Files: Like the scene files, these will upgrade when dragged into the scene or managed from the asset manager.
<li> Skyline Installation: To make the process of upgrading painless, we have an auto update system which offers you the update and when proceeding, will download and patch your current installation. When done, skyline will reboot and you can keep on working. Patch updates can be between 15mb > 300mb+
</ul>

11) We use a propriety archive format(*.pak) designed only to work inside skylines end game or editor. These files are as secure as any other game or engines assets.
There is second archive(*.ark) that is used only for in editor use and wont load into a compiled game, this is useful for selling assets that you do not wish to provide raw files with or simply for sample assets.
Games are exported easily using our wizard system, it is capable of setting loading screens and choosing levels to export the game and choosing which levels are the default. It offers multiple release versions including Stand alone games(Everything in one place) or Player based games, which is great for small games or sample levels as it keeps file size down. Other features include setting icon for exe's and future versions will even compile an installer of the game for you.

I hope this all makes sense to you and helps in your decision making process :D

Read the blog on this here: Blog.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk

yes, i would agree. We recently got some new laptops for development away from the studio and they are running i3 processors and are running skyline perfectly. I will make this adjustment across the websites :P Thanks.

Before we were going of the specs we know would run skyline efficiently as we have i7's ourselves for our main dev machines :)

thanks :) We are currently still using DX9 and will be expanding to DX11 and openGL. The images should look even better then hehe :P We can use rigged 3D characters, but you currently need to use a package like blender, 3dsmax or even an online site like Mixamo. We import most things using the standard .FBX and you can import extra animations onto your characters if the skeletons are the same in the FBX files. Check out this blog on Mixamo fuse to skyline: Blog.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk

Part 2 is here : Blog.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk

Hope this helps :)

Read the blog about this here: Blog.aurasoft-skyline.co.uk

Here is a video of the Visual Mechanics editor:
Indiedb.com

There is a lot of styling and work to do on the editor still before release :)

We do have a visual scripting (which we call a visual mechanics editor) already in development which will make most games possible without any coding/scripting what so ever, this will be released over the next few months.

Ideas and suggestions are always welcome regardless of age.

As for your age i will say keep at it and in a few years you will become a competent game developer. Hold your dream and stick to it. Learn & practice... practice... practice.

I hope you get broadband one day and are able to try our engine, join our community and create some amazing games.

We plan on being around for a while so we hope to see you in the future :)

We have had another thought. We could send you the free version on a DVD, but that would cost a small amount for Postage & Packing and admin time.

And if you wanted to purchase, then we could send another DVD out with a serial number with obvious incurred charges. etc... but it would be hard to keep up to date.

Maybe we need to create a retail product version of skyline.

Q) Have you managed to download other game engines such as unreal or unity?

From my knowledge with construct 2, i would guess that you are talking about the visual scripting / visual mechanics. We already have an editor and core built for this featureset but it requires a bit more work before it is usable for the masses. It is a coming soon... feature :).

Perhaps if you could show an example of what you mean, then we may be able to help or incorporate something else.

Very sorry to hear about your download speeds. We ourselves have just had issues with our broadband and it dropped to those speeds you have mentioned and it was near impossible to do anything on the internet.
Q) In what way does the download fail for you?

thank you very much for your kind comment. Yes, we are aiming to make this the simplest it can possibly be to make a game but allow unique games to be created. As seen in many comments, an SDK is wanted a lot but we do already have full lua support in engine and lua is also used for custom editor plugins to extend the skyline interface and editors :)

thanks for the comment, we have at least a minimum of a year before having this feature. It may happen sooner, but unlikely.

Stick around as we open a lot of power to our developers.
Let us know what you need the c++ SDK for and we may be able to help further.

Currently, we have a full node based visual mechanics editor in development which should be seen in the next couple of updates.
There are many built in actions( addable content ), and many presets(pre-made scripts, actions etc)... but a small level of lua coding is still required to make a game. This could change soon though.

Shame on the download speed and currency issues, if you need any more help. Please email Skyline Support.

thanks for the kind words. We aim to please. :)

thanks for stopping by. We have a new free version coming out soon which resolves some of the major issues that version faces :) The Commercial version is already ahead, is more stable and has more features. Thanks for your interest.

lol. Thank you for the continued support. I am sure the *TODO* list can be forever expanded.

The video looks slow due to screen recorder. The actual framerate was much much faster :) We are looking into new screen capture software.

Thank you for the comment, and we aim to bring you and all devs the best service possible :)

Thank you very much, we respect all the support we are receiving from people. :)

Thank you for the great comment & support. Join the forums and showcase some work :)

we will support DirectX11 at some point, but we are finalizing our main renderer first: DX9, then we are going to port to Mobile. We may find time in-between jobs to upgrade the renderer to DX11, but openGL will be added before that.

Note: We will support it eventually on our journey to V1.0 :)
So please join us on the journey.