Prefab System

It’s common to create your game scene with the same element over and over again (Columns, enemies, etc. ). In those cases duplicating your entities can be useful, but sometimes you need to edit them and then realizing that you have to change the same properties in all of the copies.

That’s why decided to introduce the idea of a prefab in the new Wave Engine version Tiger Shark (2.2.0).

A prefab is an asset that contains an entity, which that can be placed and instantiated all over your scene, allowing to edit it once and propagating its changes to all of its instances.

Scenes with repetitive elements are a great deal for our prefab system.

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Using Image Based Lighting (IBL)

Wave Engine offers a complete lighting system with different light types for different scene settings. However, sometimes you need to create a soft environment, which is difficult to create with point based lights. For example, a cool sunset with lot of ambient illumination, different colors, etc.

To do that our Standard material offers the possibility to create an Image Based Lighting (IBL from now) on your entities and adding that extra realism.

IBL example

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What’s new in Wave 2.0.5

Wave Engine 2.0.5 is out now and it has lot of features and bug fixes. However, 2 main improvements needs to be explained and you will probably need to adjust some things of your project when upgradint to this new version. These changes are:

  • VirtualScreenManager. Improvement of the old ViewportManager service.
  • 64 bits support.

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Wave Engine 2.0 Exporter Command Line Tool

In Wave Engine 2.0 we have updated the Wave Exporter Command Line Tool and added new interesting features. Previously this was only used for exporting the project assets as a post-build event but the new version incorporates the option to export specific assets, directories and an entire project, with new parameter options.

The command line tool is in the WaveExporterCMD.exe, on the Visual Editor directory (For example, in Windows usually is in ‘$(Wave Directory) / v2.0/Tools/VisualEditor/WaveExporterCMD.exe’)

Wave Exporter commands

Wave Exporter Command Line Tool allows performing the following commands:

  • Help
  • Asset
  • Directory
  • Project

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New Wave NuGet Package System

Wave Engine has been releasing several versions since the project started. In addition we allow our community to use our latest pre-release builds. This may cause a little mess when you are dealing with different projects/games with different versions at the same time. Which version should I suggest to install in all my team’s computers? What if I install more than one version at the same time?

To solve those problems we decided to update the Wave Engine default projects by using the NuGet package system.

NuGet

NuGet is a free and open source package manager (initially designed) for Microsoft platforms and provided as a Visual Studio extension. It has gained popularity and it’s also integrated in Xamarin Studio and MonoDevelop.

If you take a glimpse of its web or its IDE extension you will find plenty of different libraries with different versions and dependencies.

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Using Sprite Sheets with Wave Engine 2.0

As part of the plan of Wave Engine 2.0 to check over its features and following a process to constantly improve them, the new Wave Visual Editor gave us the opportunity to simplify a lot of things and make the development more enjoyable. One of them is the creation and use of sprite sheets textures and animating them.

What is a Sprite Sheet

If you are not familiarized with Sprite Sheets, don’t worry, this article will give you a brief explanation.

First of all we must differentiate between sprite, sprite sheet and animation concepts.

  • Sprite is just a single 2D image, which can be added to our scene.

  • Sprite Sheet is a group of different sprites put together into a one big image. They are necessary to speed up the process of displaying images on the screen because of its important impact on memory and performance. Packing algorithms are really important to keep the image as small as possible.

  • Animation with sprites is using a sprite sheet and changing which sprite is rendered, changing every frame causing the animation illusion.

They are 2 key uses for the sprite sheets in your game or application:

  • Sprite animations. For creating a 2D animated character (or object), so we have to pack all its frames as a way to make it easy to add on your project.
  • Sprite Packaging. Using a sprite sheet with no animation, just to optimize memory and performance. We usually packs a lot of our scene sprites into a sprite sheet, and we use them in our scene, adding a sprite sheet but rendering only one of its sprites.

The new Wave Engine sprite sheet format is designed to satisfy all of them.

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