He’s been hacking away with IGE 1.1.0 on a multiplayer game utilising the network stream that is built in to the engine. He just released a quick vid showing some awesome AI behaviour that he’s written:

It’s a pretty cool example of some interesting AI concepts. More to follow soon!

P.S. If you haven’t already, you can check out the latest version of the engine via github at https://github.com/coolbloke1324/ige_prototype or if you are a license holder, get the full source and multiplayer systems included at the official repo by emailing me your GitHub username and I’ll add you to the repo’s access list.

Cheers!

Here is a screenshot of “example 1.5″ (there are over 20 examples in the 1.1.0 repo) showing the different built-in filters applied to the same texture:

Once of the cool new features is the ability to draw debug lines for the paths your entity is following.

Here’s what the debug output for paths looks like (demo can run in both isometric and 2d mode with a flag so video shows both versions):

For all of you who have access to the private repo, do a “git pull” to get the latest version.

Features include 2d and isometric texture map editing, drag and drop images from your desktop to the browser to create cell-sheets and textures, properties and transforms editor and loads more!

This version includes MySQL support, numerous new tests / examples, the new Net.io networking system and updates to the CocoonJS wrapper component for CocoonJS compatibility.

The preview release of IGE 1.1.0 is now available in the secure store for Online Premium license holders. Download your copy and try out the new version now!

You can discuss this release on the forum at: https://getsatisfaction.com/irrelon_software/topics/ige_1_1_0_alpha_preview_released

Still lots to do before 1.1.0 is ready for release but things have just jumped forward massively because of the depth-sorting being completed!

Cheers!

The What’s New section of the 1.1.0 documentation is up in draft form. Take a look to get an idea of some of the changes coming in 1.1.0.

http://www.isogenicengine.com/documentation/isogenic-game-engine/versions/1-1-0/whats-new/

So this month has been crazy. Productivity has been through the roof and IGE 1.1.0 is literally incredible so far but before we jump into the massive upgrades that 1.1.0 will bring, I wanted to draw your attention to an indie game dev company called “The Mighty Deer Ug” that is using the IGE (1.0.0) to create a game called Pioneer Legends. There team has put together an amazing game and it looks just stunning:

“Like Farmville mixed with Foursquare. Only fun.”

The team based in Germany were kind enough to allow me access to their early private beta and even at that early stage the game was amazing. Now it has evolved even more and is truly a testament to what can be done when you get a bunch of clever people in the same room to make a game! Pioneer Legends can be found at: http://www.pioneerlegends.com

Version 1.1.0 Pre-Launch Info

So now onto 1.1.0 pre-launch info… amongst some of the cool new things:

• A new font sheet generator tool that creates font sprite sheets for automatically loading into 1.1.0. Generate all the fonts you need to use in your game so that even if you’re running on a browser / device that doesn’t have the font you want to use, your game will still look the same. You can check out the font generator live here: http://www.isogenicengine.com/tools/fontSheetGenerator and you can check out the full source code and fork it yourself over on GitHub here: https://github.com/coolbloke1324/FontSheetGenerator - it even supports Google Web Fonts!
• The engine has been completely re-written using the class system that John Resig published over here: http://ejohn.org/blog/simple-javascript-inheritance/ which means you can do some really great things like proper class extending. If you want to extend the functionality of part of the engine you can just extend the class and write your new methods. Bam!
• IGE 1.1.0 has, hands-down the most advanced and most versatile particle emitter system available in any HTML engine currently available. Create magic spells that fire burning circles of light around your character, create gentle snow or heavy rain, fireworks that explode and generate further chained particle emissions. Sprinkle pixie-dust from your fairy as she flies around a level. HTML games have never been this beautiful or exciting to look at!
• Demo showing 2,000 entities, all randomly translating, rotating and scaling EVERY frame in realtime at 60fps + a demo with over 500 particles on screen at once generating a snow storm and a garden sprinkler.
• iBacteria (http://www.ibacteria.co.uk) running on an Android phone at 160fps during the most CPU intensive parts of the game.
• The engine is fully compatible with CocoonJS native mobile wrapper to launch your games on iOS and Android App Stores. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhGUTXI9ZqQ - the video is still rough around the edges which is why it is unreleased but with the direct link you can still watch it.
• 1.1.0 has more game templates than ever before and the code quality and readability is the best ever. IsoCity has been re-written and runs in both client-only and multiplayer mode with really easy to understand game logic flow and well-commented code sections. The line-up continues with the new iBacteria Online code and BlackJack – again re-written to be clean, efficient and easy to understand. What’s more, all templates now have their own GitHub repos that you can fork, play with and submit pull requests for.
• Tweening performance has been given a major boost as well as the transform system, both of which now run 2 to 4 times faster than the same systems in 1.0.0.
• The server has had a complete re-write along with the engine and is now much easier to install, run and to understand. The server-side has also been fully tested and works perfectly in Node.js for windows so you can do all your development on a single box, even if you don’t know how to install a Linux VirtualBox / server (or just don’t want to).
• Every class is now it’s own private Node.js module as well as being able to execute the exact same code in the browser. In the past we had to declare global variables to get the engine to work on both environments, no longer!
• A full tutorial on how to run, debug and step through your code when running with Node.js is included in the documentation folder. We recommend the EXCELLENT JetBrains WebStorm IDE for all your JS / Node.js development. It’s what the engine was written and tested with!
• All engine code has been passed through JSLint for quality checking.
• Engine schematics and UML diagrams come as part of the download and show how each part of the engine connects with the others.
• Everything can be mounted to everything else. This means that you can control what entities are currently being processed on your Scene (previously called IgeMap) by mounting or un-mounting entities from it. Entities can also be mounted to other entities. Want a smoke trail to come out the back of your space ship? Just create the particle emitter and then mount it to your space ship entity.
• The engine no longer creates any HTML elements when it runs. In fact, it no longer has jQuery built-in either. You can pass a canvas to it or ask it to create one for you. That is the extent of the engine’s interaction with the DOM. This is to ensure compatibility with the CocoonJS wrapper which does not have a DOM or any HTML rendering capabilities (one of the reasons it is so fast!)
• Viewports no longer have their own canvas elements. All viewports are now rendered as part of the scene. You can think of viewports as just “special” entities with their texture set to another scene / camera combo.
• Viewports, cameras and entities all share the exact same transform system so you can move a viewport the same way you move a camera or entity. This is also the case for scaling, rotating, setting opacity, depth and width / height.
• Textures (previously called assets) can be sliced up just like before (using a sprite sheet) with cells placed at regular intervals, or you can now specify individual rectangle regions of an image that multiple textures can be derived from.
• Client / server world data has had a complete overhaul as well. It is now really easy to define which entities exist on the client, server or both and provide completely different traits to server-side from client-side versions of the same entity.
• You can now specify an individual entity tick method or use the built-in extended method from the IgeEntity base class… or both. This allows you to determine what happens to an entity from within it’s defining class on each engine tick.
• Mouse / touch events are no longer listened for across multiple viewports or entities, everything is fired from a central engine class that handles everything for you. This makes handling mouse events much faster than previous versions of the engine.
• UI elements such as buttons, check-boxes, sliders etc are all included as standard classes that you can either use as-is or extend to create even more complex user interactive systems. A bunch of standard textures are also included to help make those UI elements easy to use out of the box.
• The engine now has a bunch of unit tests in place to ensure release-quality code before every launch. The test suite is open-source and will be available on GitHub along with all the game templates once 1.1.0 is launched.
• We are launching a plugins market to encourage developers to share or sell their IGE plugins. If you’ve come up with a really great plugin such as an awesome-looking mini-map/radar, a new texture packing system, a map data loader that can read maps from third-party apps, you’ll be able to share or sell it in the plugin market.

And a release date? While these things can never be written in stone, I am expecting a beta version out in a few weeks, with a release-quality version out shortly after that.

In the past the engine’s API has been overhauled a lot. This has allowed it to evolve and become the best it can be but has also put a lot of stress on developers who had written games in a previous version and found porting a bit of a problem.

1.1.0 will represent the final API – ensuring that backward compatibility is maintained from 1.1.0 onwards. Further updates to the engine will not break games or code written in 1.1.0.

And finally, the Irrelon GameHost service hasn’t been forgotten in the long list of updates and we’ll have a separate announcement about that soon, but think… Heroku but for games… with Git support…

Thanks for reading.

Rob Evans
CEO & Lead Developer
Irrelon Software Limited
www.isogenicengine.com

P.S. Sorry there weren’t any pancakes!