Rolling out later in February will be a new version of AppGameKit featuring some very cool features. We're sure you're going to have a lot of fun using them and we cannot wait to see what you create.
Coming attractions...
An important toolset for any game developer is a great terrain system. AppGameKit will feature commands that make it very easy to generate a terrain on which you can base your games. Here's a screen shot from the current progress on terrain, this first image is a 512x512 terrain matrix which is typical of what many users will use to create a landscape. The colours are generated by a shader based on height which we'll include in a demo when we release V2.0.17
The second screenshot is a stress test to see how much we could throw at the terrain system. We used a 4200x4200 heightmap and split it into 9 terrain objects, and to our surprise it works really well! It's pushing the limits of our GPU and uses over a gigabyte of memory, but it taught us a lot about where AppGameKit is using memory and from that we've been ale to make AppGameKit more efficient as a result.
We still have some work to do on it, currently each terrain object is a single mesh, it should be split to make use of frustum culling, and a lot of height map editors export to 16 bit png format, so we want to see if we can support that too.
Other significant features to look forward to are;
- Alpha masking
- 3D Fog
- .fbx support!
- Assign arrays at any time
- Mac & Windows export from the IDE
This next build will complete all our promises from the original Kickstarter and we'll be pushing on to enhance and improve AppGameKit.
The AppGameKit Team