WaveEngine 2.4.1 to 2.5.0

This article is a brief guide to solving the majority of problems that you will find when you upgrade your game project from WaveEngine 2.4.1 version to 2.5.0.

Although WaveEngine has an upgrade tool that runs when you open an old game project with the current WaveEditor 2.5, you can find some issues listed below.

An important point to bear in mind is that Model, ModelRenderer and MaterialsMap components are not longer supported, so you should replace them to use FileMesh, MeshRenderer and MaterialComponent respectively. For more details, you can read the following article. We allowed them to be used in the previous version as deprecated classes.

So, here we go!

Loading Game Info

The most important change is that we need to Load the GameInfo file (.wgame).

WaveEngine 2.4.1

WaveEngine 2.5.0

RenderLayers

Main difference is LayerType properties has changed to LayerId, holding now an int identifier instead of a Type.

WaveEngine 2.4.1

WaveEngine 2.5.0

WaveEngine 2.4.1

WaveEngine 2.5.0

Mainly every property Type LayerType has been changed to int LayerId.

Sampler State

The AddressMode has now evolved to the SamplerState, and can be configured in the Texture Asset, instead of the material or the component.

StandardMaterial

WaveEngine 2.4.1

WaveEngine 2.5.0

WaveEngine 2.4.1

WaveEngine 2.5.0

WaveEngine 2.4.1

WaveEngine 2.5.0

WaveEngine 2.4.1

WaveEngine 2.5.0

WaveEngine 2.4.1

WaveEngine 2.5.0

Dual Material

The DualMaterial class has been removed. It has been merged into the StandardMaterial, which now has Diffuse1 and Diffuse2 properties, among others.

Render Layers in Wave Engine Orca 2.5.0

Before this version, when the user wanted to customize some aspect of the rasterizer, blending or the depth states, we needed to create by code a new Layer class, registering it manually and then acceding it by its type. And you needed to implement the SetDevice and RestoreDevice methods, changint the RenderState structure.

Initially we just wanted to integrated them into the Visual Editor, but then we realised that we weren’t allowing the users to use the full potential of the modern graphical cards, so we redesigned it.

So the RenderLayer concept was born, a Visual Editor friendly specification of how the geometry and shaders are presented into the final frame. Our most important goal was to keep the simplicity of the previous implementation but adding the full potential of the modern graphic cards.

Continue reading Render Layers in Wave Engine Orca 2.5.0

Using Wave Services from Visual Editor.

In WaveEngine the use of Services can be very useful when developing your applications / games. And, as you can create and register your own services you can add cross-scene and global elements that provide useful logic, like score managers,  entry points to native libraries, and much more. However, until now, Visual Editor didn’t allow you to register your own services, so you had to do that from code. That could cause problems: Creating components that use custom services could be tricky to debug in our Visual Editor, or depending on your code, it may directly provoke malfunctions in your scene.

Luckily, WaveEngine 2.40 has introduced the possibility of registering and setting up your custom services, as well as some Wave Extension services.

Continue reading Using Wave Services from Visual Editor.

What’s new in Wave Engine 2.3.1

Wave Engine 2.3.1 has been released today.  This version adds some important features that we think our community will enjoy, like binary scene serialization and OpenGL support in Windows. Let’s have a look in detail.

Bokeh lens sample

Continue reading What’s new in Wave Engine 2.3.1

[Working on] Relative entity paths

In the next Wave Engine version, we are introducing a new feature that can help improving your productivity.

We have decided to add relative entity path in our engine, allowing to obtain an entity just knowing its path from another entity.

This will be really helpful when you’re creating components that reference other entities and:

  • You don’t know the target entity’s absolute path.
  • Your component is used several times in your scene.
  • You want to make your component / entity reusable.

Continue reading [Working on] Relative entity paths

New Animation 2D and 3D GameActions

Wave Engine 2.3.0 (Saw Shark) has added a lot of new features. One of them is a new set of GameActions specialized for animating entities. In this article you may have been realized that GameActions are a really powerful and customizable way to create your own behaviors and interact with others in an easy flow, creating sequential and parallel GameActions to animate your entities. However, they relied on the user the task of creating its own animations as WaveEngine offered the architecture.

Good news is that we’ve included a complete set of GameActions in WaveEngine.Components package. That includes type animations for simple types and transform animations for rotating, scaling and translating entities.

And because they are GameActions, they can be played in sequential order or parallel to others.

Continue reading New Animation 2D and 3D GameActions

Text 2D & 3D with Visual Editor 2.3.0

In the next Wave 2.3.0 we are introducing a useful set of components that will help to create your games. Some of them are the TextComponent, TextRenderer2D and TextRenderer3D components, allowing the user to create 2D and 3D labels in your scene directly from our Visual Editor. This article will explain how to create them.

Continue reading Text 2D & 3D with Visual Editor 2.3.0

Tutorial – Create your app with HoloLens

In this tutorial, we will cover the creation of your first HoloLens app using Wave EngineWe will find out why using this engine is a good choice for creating your holographic experience.

In this app we will load a plane in front of the viewer.

Prerequisites

For simulating your app you will need a Windows 10 PC configured with the correct tools:

Project assets

  • Download the files required by the project here.

Continue reading Tutorial – Create your app with HoloLens

Deploy your Wave Engine game in Xbox One

 

Microsoft really put a lot of effort in its Universal Window Platform (UWP) architecture, allowing the developer to use the same API to develop your application on tablets, mobile phones, PC and now, your XBox One console.

This is an awesome new for Wave Engine users because now we can create our games directly for Xbox One and deploy them.

Continue reading Deploy your Wave Engine game in Xbox One