Xenko 2.1 release notes

12 September 2017

Highlights

Local reflections

Xenko 2.1 introduces local reflections. When you enable this post effect, the scene is reflected in glossy materials.

You can enable and customize local reflections in the graphics compositor on the post effects properties.

For details, see Local reflections.

Clear coat shading

Xenko 2.1 includes a clear-coat material template that uses physically-based rendering to simulate vehicle paint.

Clear-coat shading has several advantages over creating the effect manually with material layers:

• layers are blended based on distance
• increased performance
• improved visualization

You can add a predefined clear coat material from the Asset view under Add asset > Material.

For details, see Clear coat shading.

Thin glass materials

You can now render thin glass materials such as windshields. The diffuse color controls the tint of the glass and how much light is blocked (darker colors block more light).

You can add a predefined Glass material from the Asset view under Add asset > Material.

Improved light shafts

You can now use light shafts with any kind of light that casts shadows (ie point lights, directional lights, or spot lights). You can also use them with multiple shadow cascades.

Additionally, Game Studio now displays light shaft bounding volumes in the scene editor, so you can easily see the areas where light shafts are created. To show or hide navigation light shaft bounding volumes, in the scene editor toolbar, open the gizmo options menu and use the Light shaft bounding volumes checkbox.

The LightShaftComponent settings have been simplified and now have settings to control quality and performance.

For details, see Light shafts.

Texture streaming

Xenko now supports streaming for textures. This significantly decreases the time it takes to load a game or scene, uses less memory, and makes your game easier to scale.

Streaming is enabled for textures by default. You can find the option in the texture properties under Format.

You can also set the global Streaming settings in Game settings.

For details, see Streaming.

Render masks

You can now set which render groups a camera renders under Graphics Compositor > Entry points > Render masks. For example, you can have a model be visible to Camera A but invisible to Camera B.

For details, see Render groups and masks.

Improved profiler

The Game Profiler script now displays more information and is easier to use.

You can now:

• profile GPU information

• switch between CPU, GPU, and FPS-only results with F1

• sort the result pages by Name or Time with F2

• change how frequently the profiler gets and displays new results with - / +

• jump to a results page with the number keys, or move forward and backwards with F3 and F4

• set parameters in Game Studio:

  

For details, see Profiling.

Debug text

You can now display debug text at runtime. For more information, see Debug text.

Rewritten input system

The input system has been rewritten to track different input devices and allow for better extensibility.

• Allows detection of added/removed devices through events on the InputManager
• New device interfaces such as IMouseDevice, IKeyboardDevice, IGameController
• High-level IGamePadDevice replaces the gamepad functionality, with support for XInput
• Lower-level IGameControllerDevice allows access to numbered buttons/axes
• Automatic detection of plugged-in/removed controllers
• Support for different keyboard layouts and IME for text input
• Access to resolution and absolute coordinates for mouse/pointer devices
• KeyEvent now has a RepeatCount member, indicating how many times the key has been repeated while being held down

For details, see Input.

Improved Direct3D 12 support

To support graphics functionalities on every platform, we've implemented missing features for the DirectX 12 rendering backend:

• compute and tessellation shaders
• unordered access views for textures and buffers
• structured buffers

For more details, see the Changelog below.

Improved environment fresnel

Fresnel describes how light is reflected depending on the angle the material is viewed from. Typically, high angles are more reflective.

Previously, Xenko used an imprecise polynomial approximation to compute the fresnel for environment lighting (such as cubemaps), resulting in a bigger-than-expected white outline. Xenko now defaults to a precomputed BRDF environment lookup texture that matches our default lighting equations (GGX Schlick). This produces much more accurate rendering.

Japanese documentation

The documentation is now available in Japanese. To switch languages, use the Language button in the top-right of the documentation site.

Breaking changes

Input system

• Renamed PointerState to PointerEventType
• Changed the members of PointerEventType:
  • Down has been renamed to Pressed
  • Move has been renamed to Moved
  • Up has been renamed to Released
  • Cancel has been renamed to Canceled
  • Out has been removed; use Canceled instead
• Renamed InputManager.ActivatedGestures to InputManager.Gestures
• Changed checking support for sensors using Sensor.IsSupported to InputManager.Sensor != null (where Sensor is the name of the sensor you're checking)
• The HasDown/Pressed/ReleasedMouseButtons() functions on the InputManager are now properties
• Removed GetGamePad(); use IGamePadDevice.State to acquire a gamepad state

  To obtain a gamepad, use InputManager.GamePads, InputManager.GetGamePadByIndex(index) or use the InputManager.DeviceAdded/Removed events

• Removed GamePadState.IsConnected; use the InputManager.DeviceAdded/Removed events or check the value returned by InputManager.GetGamePadByIndex(index) != null
• Moved IsPadButtonDown/Pressed/Released() to the IGamePadDevice as IGamePadDevice.IsButtonDown/Pressed/Released()
• Moved the SetGamePadVibration() function to the IGamePadDevice
• Locking the mouse with InputManager.LockMousePosition() no longer automatically hides the cursor; use IGame.IsMouseVisible for this
• Removed PointerEvent.PointerType; use PointerEvent.Device is IMouseDevice to check if the event came from a mouse
• Removed PointerEvent.IsPrimary
• Renamed PointerId on PointerEvent to Id
• Renamed State on PointerEvent to EventType and its type to PointerEventType
• Removed KeyEvent.Type; to check if this was a pressed or released event, use the boolean KeyEvent.IsDown
• MouseWheelDelta is now -1 or 1 per scroll unit instead of -120 or 120
• Removed MultiTouchEnabled on the InputManager; multi-touch is always enabled

Light shafts

• Removed ExtinctionFactor and ExtinctionRatio to simplify the light shaft component

Engine

• Renamed DebugConsoleSystem to DebugTextSystem
• Now default RenderStageSelector select all entity groups

Known issues

• On Linux, when switching the underlying graphics platform, rendering doesn't occur or fail. To fix the problem, delete the cache, local, and roaming folders on the Linux host and restart the game
• • On iOS, if Enable device-specific builds is on (set in the project properties), it's not possible to debug game code. To speed up development, manually select the architecture of your device from the Advanced tab
• Performance issues on mobile (being worked on)
• Live scripting has been temporarily disabled

Changelog

Version 2.1.0.3 - 12 September 2017

Enhancements

General

• Updated the list of third-party libraries and sorted by editor and runtime dependencies

Game Studio

• Reviewed and rewritten editor text (menus, button labels, tooltips and so on)
• Removed redundant dialog boxes
• Improved directional light gizmo visuals
• Improved translation gizmo design. Translation planes now always face the camera
• Reduced graphical glitches and optimized navigation mesh overlay rendering
• Removed special character restriction on string keys for dictionaries
• Changed the default color of the clear frame for better prefab editing
• Added a mark for the origin in the scene and prefab editor
• Added wireframe bounding volume for light shafts
• Added a context menu entry in the asset view to copy an asset's URL
• Allowed mixed document orientation in the dock panel

Assets

• Updated to latest version of DirectXTex
• Improved the computation of dependencies between assets leading to faster build and thumbnails generation
• Changed how root parts of hierarchical assets (prefab, scene, UI) are referenced and serialized (direct references instead of Guids)

Engine

• Added render group mask on the SceneCameraRenderer to cull entities per camera
• Improved the game profiler (reduced performance impact, improved UX & visual, etc)
• Added a profiling key to the script component for user script profiling
• Added streaming support for textures.
• Added support for GPU queries.

Graphics

• FXAA Quality was crashing in many cases, because the value doesn't work with all numbers between 10 and 39. It's now exposed as two controls: a Dithering combobox and a Quality slider
• Improved MSAA depth buffer resolving
• Minor shader fixes
• Added option for random texture sampling to texture maps
• Enabled shadow casting for transparent materials
• Added IsAlphaCutoff option in sprite component
• Added swap function to Texture to swap the content of two textures

Direct3D 12

• Command List implementations for Dispatch, ClearReadWrite, Copy, CopyMultisample, CopyCount
• Resource state transitions fixes
• Resource barriers batching
• Added proper ClearValue setup for render targets and depth stencil buffers
• Added DX12 Debug Layer filter for irrelevant warnings
• Added support for:
  • compute pipeline support
  • tessellation
  • compute, hull, domain and geometry shaders
  • unordered access views for textures and buffers
  • structured buffers
  • staging textures and buffers

Input

• Added AbsoluteMousePosition information to the InputManger.
• Improved gamepad support (new devices supported, improved API, runtime detection, etc.)
• Add interpreted key and IME input support

Navigation

• Changed the default size of new navigation mesh bounding volumes to (1,1,1)

Android

• Modify application context creation to allow use of external display

UWP

• Implemented support for CoreWindow. Disabled for the moment

Bugs fixed

Game Studio

• Live update of the directional, point and spot light gizmo color wasn't working
• Enabling/disabling light shaft bounding volume components now works as intended
• Added "Fix references" dialog when removing directories with assets
• Corrected lots of English mistakes
• Fixed lots of issues with copy and paste (and replace). Notably it is now possible to copy entities from a scene and child scene at the same time.
• Fixed issues with "Create library from selection" in the UI editor
• Made the GameStudio crash in some rare cases where exceptions could leave a project in a corrupted state
• Fixed various isues in the UI editor when moving elements in the hierarchy
• Fixed issues with thumbnails generation
• Fixed issues with the anchor of a child scene

Assets

• Asset compilation of huge FBX was sometimes ending in timeout
• Fixed normals, tangents and bitangents NaN values happening during model import

Engine

• Fixed various memory leaks, especially when destroying a game
• Clustered lighting code was buggy when rendering to multiple views
• Fixed sprite bounding box and frustum culling calculation
• Fixed texture and buffer memory calculations accessible from GraphicsDevice
• Removed obsolete ChildSceneComponent class

Graphics

• Fixed bug with grid ignoring depth with MSAA enabled
• Added support for nointerpolation/noperspective in Xenko shaders
• Fixed various problems with black artifacts in the shaders (NaNs and invalid normals)
• Light shafts now work as expected when using self-overlapping bounding volumes
• Fixed light probes applying previous environment light twice when there are no light probes
• Material specular map IsEnergyConservative now properly taken into account
• Fixed transparent materials shadows
• Fixed transparent and alpha cut off materials shadows
• Fixed two-sided and flipped material shading
• Fixed mipmap counting

Physics

• Fixed capsule shape orientation