Forums Opened, New Release With Image-Based Lighting

Discover the latest Stride release featuring Cubemap Image-Based Lighting and join our newly opened forums for discussions, support, and collaboration.

Forums 🔗

Due to popular demand, we have just opened a shiny new Xenko discussion forums!

We hope this place will become an important place for our community to discuss, help each other, collaborate, improve Xenko and show us some of their work.

Even though Xenko Team will follow discussions and might answer, we currently won't provide any official support here and might not answer your bug/feature requests (a forum is not well suited for that).

Please use Xenko GitHub for bug/enhancement requests, and our AnswersHub website for Q&A.

Cubemap Image-Based Lighting 🔗

Over the next few months, on top of working on a level editor, we also want to improve the rendering quality. We know Xenko can scale well from mobile to high-end and we want to prove it!

As part of this effort, this release includes image-based reflection lighting, with parallax correction.

It supports multiple cubemaps: they will be accumulated during a specific deferred rendering step, similar to prelight rendering.

Feel free to try it easily with a new dedicated sample, that you can create with only a few clicks inside Xenko Studio.

Spotlight Shadowmaps 🔗

On top of our already existing cascade directional shadowmaps, this release adds support for spotlight shadowmaps.

Improvements 🔗

We have done numerous bugfixes and improvements (see full details in changelog).

Amongst them are a new UI slider component, physics has been modularized, Windows Phone/Store support has been improved (PCL support, properly build packages), GameStudio property grid should behave much better, etc...

Version 1.0.0-beta03 🔗

Release date: 2014/11/11

New Features 🔗

• Engine: Add cubemap components to place cubemaps in the scene or render them at runtime.
• Graphics: Add skybox renderer from a TextureCube (similar to background renderer).
• Graphics: Add cubemap reflections for deferred rendering.
• Graphics: Support of shadow mapping in forward rendering for spot lights. Only 1 cascade is supported at the moment.
• Samples: Add CubemapReflection sample.
• Samples: Add spot light shadow in ForwardRendering sample.
• Shaders: Add several cubemap shaders for sampling, reflection, parallax correction etc.
• UI: Add new UI element: Slider
• Website: Xenko Forums has just been opened. Feel free to use it to discuss about Xenko, help each other, collaborate and show off what you did with Xenko!

Enhancements 🔗

• Studio: Property grids have been reworked to be more efficient and easily extendable.
• Studio: Numeric input controls have been improved.
• Physics: Physics assembly now depends on Engine (instead of the opposite). Soon Physics (and some other modules) will become optional.
• Input: Allow emulation of several touch pointers at a same time with mouse different buttons.

Issues fixed 🔗

• Assets: Fix shininess import from FBX files.
• Core: EnumerableExtensions.LastIndexOf() wasn't working properly (#62).
• Game: Properly support windows with height 0 when AllowUserResizing is true (#65).
• Game: GameForm is created with a black background, to avoid initial flickering while Windows is being initialized (#54).
• Input: Alt+F4 is now properly working on Windows Store/Phone platforms (#74).
• Input: Properly maps all extended keyboard keys on Windows Store/Phone platforms (#84).
• Input: Fix several crashes and bugs in GestureRecognizers and mouse button states.
• Misc: PCL can now be used in Windows Store/Phone platforms (#72).
• Samples: SimpleDynamicTexture was using expected screen size instead of actual screen size, resulting in incorrect picking in fullscreen mode (#75).
• Shaders: Geometry shaders are forced to transmit SV_Position stream to pixel shaders.
• Shaders: Compositions (especially arrays) couldn't be used in child classes of the one containing their declaration. Function and member calls weren't correctly resolved.
• Studio: Fix preview and thumbnail of materials with normal map.
• Studio: Fix binding errors in the property grid (#29).
• Studio: Fix undesired hue changes and loss of precision in extremal values in the color picker.
• Studio: Fix "Show in explorer" on assets.
• UI: UIImage borders were not properly rendered when image had Orientation.Rotated90.

Breaking changes 🔗

• Graphics: Remove Rotated180 and Rotated90C from ImageOrientation enumeration for code simplicity and efficiency purpose.
• Graphics: Change ImageFragment.Region type from Rectangle to RectangleF and corresponding batch draw function API (SpriteBatch/UIBatch).
• Graphics: CopyRegion now contains additional parameters for subresource indices and destination offset.
• Graphics: RasterizerState and DepthStencilState constructors are now private to match other Graphics classes. static New() should be used instead (#83).
• Physics: Physics engine initialization has changed since now Physics is a optional module. (please check updated samples)
• Physics: Added Convex Hull simple wrap shape and complex decomposition as well.

Known Issues 🔗

• Physics: Complex convex hull decomposition can be a very long process and there is visual feedback for it.
• Physics: Convex hull shape debug shapes in game studio are not rendering very well, although the asset will be OK.